The names which were most often cited to prove the incompetency of contemporary judgment on works of art of modern tendency are most unfortunately chosen. Millet, Rousseau, and Corot were looked upon by their contemporaries as smearers and daubers; Manet was laughed to scorn, Böcklin pronounced a fool, his friends advised Hans Thoma to change his name, etc., etc. In order not to go to too great length I will now leave Thoma and Böcklin out of the discussion. But the others! That Rousseau and, especially, Corot passed for smearers and daubers among their contemporaries is simply not true; on the contrary, justice was at once done to them for their technique. Even their most unscrupulous opponents admitted that they were draughtsmen and colourists. What they were reproached with was only the alleged intellectual insignificance of their work. People remained under the influence of classical landscape with ancient buildings or ruins, and a decoration of ideal figures such as Poussin brought into fashion, and Claude Lorrain cultivated. A landscape without nymphs or shepherds in Arcadian dress, without temples or figures of Hermes, seemed empty, insignificant, ignoble. The majority had as yet no taste for the witchery of mood in wood and field. Why, Corot himself was not clear about what was new and determinative in his own art, for in some of his grandest pictures Dryads dance, beneath young-leaved trees immersed in the mists of springtide, the most correct sham-classic square dance. It was only in his last period that he renounced this ancient magic. Rousseau had broken away from tradition more resolutely, and was on that account less esteemed than Corot by contemporaries whose education had been perverted by precedent. But the worst that was said against the two did not go beyond the assertion that they were “vulgar.”