In the meantime, however, Rousseau's fame had grown, fostered by the more advanced critics of the time. He lived at Barbizon, on the border of the forest of Fontainebleau; and, basing his work on the most uncompromising study of nature, his pictures bore an impress of simple truth, which to our latter-day vision seems so obvious and easily understood that nothing could show more clearly the depth of error into which his opponents had fallen than the systematic rejection of his work for so many years. He was by nature a leader, and in his country home he was soon joined by Millet and Charles Jacque, while in Paris he had the hearty support of Delacroix and his followers of the Romantic school. While forced by circumstances to find allies in these men, Rousseau had, however, but little of the imaginative temperament. He was, above all, the close student of natural phenomena. He sat, an impartial recorder of the phases of nature's triumphal procession. Early and late, in the fields, among the rocks, or under the trees of the forest, his cunning hand noted an innumerable variety of facts which before him, through ignorance or disdain, the landscape painter had never seen. It is but fair to say that, like all pioneers in the untrodden fields of art, his means of expression at times failed to keep pace with his intention. His work is occasionally overburdened with detail, through the embarrassment of riches which nature poured at his feet. Then, heir to the processes of painting of former generations, it seemed to him necessary to endow nature with a warmth of coloring, an abuse of the richer tones of the palette, which we may presume he would have discarded but for the fact already noted, that a painter carries through his earthly pilgrimage a baggage of early-formed habits difficult to throw off _en route_. The belief that color to be beautiful must of necessity be warm, rich, and deep in tone was shared by all painters of Rousseau's time, and lingers still in the minds of many, despite the fact that nature has created the tea-rose as well as the orange. When, however, Rousseau was completely successful--as, for instance, in the "Hoar-frost," in the Walters gallery in Baltimore--the reward of his painstaking methods was measurably great. In such works as this the rendition of effect, the certainty of modelling, the sustained power throughout the work, lift it beyond mere transcription of fact into the realm of typical creations which appear more true than average reality. [Illustration: A SHEPHERD AND HIS FLOCK. FROM A PAINTING BY CHARLES ÉMILE JACQUE. A typical example of the master, solidly painted, though, as was often his habit, somewhat forced in effect.]