Constable had been the first to free himself from every stereotyped rule, and he was an influence in France. The younger generation were in ecstasies over this intense green, the agitated clouds, this effervescent power inspiring everything with life. Though as yet but little esteemed even in England, Constable received the gold medal in Paris, and from that time took a fancy to Parisian exhibitions, and still in 1827 exhibited in the Louvre by the side of Bonington, who had but one year more in which to give admirable lessons by his bright plains and clear shining skies. At the same time Bonington's friend and compatriot, William Reynolds, then likewise domiciled in Paris, contributed some of his powerful and often delicate landscape studies, the tender grey notes of which are like anticipations of Corot. This influence of the English upon the creators of _paysage intime_ has long been an acknowledged fact, since Delacroix himself, in his article "Questions sur le Beau" in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ in 1854, has affirmed it frankly. The very next years announced what a ferment Constable had stirred in the more restless spirits. The period from 1827 to 1830 showed the birth-throes of French landscape painting. In 1831 it was born. In this year, for ever marked in the annals of French, and indeed of European art, there appeared together in the Salon, for the first time, all those young artists who are now honoured as the greatest in the century: all, or almost all, were children of Paris, the sons of small townsmen or of humble artisans; all were born in the old quarter of the city or in its suburbs, in the midst of a desolate wilderness of houses, and destined for that very reason to be great landscape painters. For it is not through chance that _paysage intime_ immediately passed from London, the city of smoke, to Paris, the second great modern capital, and reached Germany from thence only at a much later time. [Illustration: _L'Art._ THÉODORE ROUSSEAU.] "Do you remember the time," asks Bürger-Thoré of Théodore Rousseau in the dedicatory letter to his _Salon_ of 1844,--"do you still recall the years when we sat on the window-ledges of our attics in the Rue de Taitbout, and let our feet dangle at the edge of the roof, contemplating the chaos of houses and chimneys, which you with a twinkle in your eye compared to mountains, trees, and outlines of the earth? You were not able to go to the Alps, into the cheerful country, and so you created picturesque landscapes for yourself out of these horrible skeletons of wall. Do you still recall the little tree in Rothschild's garden, which we caught sight of between two roofs? It was the one green thing that we could see; every fresh shoot of the little poplar wakened our interest in spring, and in autumn we counted the falling leaves."