It is sufficient to say few words as to his outer life. Impelled by his bent for painting, he came to Paris at the age of twenty, and had the good fortune to be taken as a pupil by old Corot. He saw Th. Rousseau and Millet working with his master, and he lived during the most susceptible years of youth amongst such originals, in the most glorious Barbizon period. His natural tendency directed him imperiously to landscape painting. This, then, is the substance of his whole life as an artist. Incited by Millet’s example, in his young days he put peasants in his fields and meadows, but they were always mere accessories in the landscape, and arrested the eye less than the ground and plants. He had then also sufficient knowledge of himself to abandon, at an early stage, human figures, for he realised that there was more life in the tiniest sod of his turf than in his conscientious but insignificant villagers. In the high school, in which it was his privilege to learn, he acquired that certainty and force which distinguished him up to his old age. When, however, he had mastered Corot’s brilliant technique and Rousseau’s draughtsmanship and composition, he ceased to be an imitative disciple, and with full deliberation, went his own ways, which for a time lay far from Corot’s goal, but at last, by a wonderfully circuitous route, brought him back to it once more. Not long did he try modestly and laudably, with a good young man’s carefully moderated works, in the _Salon_ for certificates of industry and good marks from the academical masters. At once he joined the hot-headed set; he exhibited, from 1864 onwards, only in the “Salon of the Rejected” and with the “Independents,” and became one of the most prominent men in the group of impressionists.