In the presence of nature one saturates one's self with truth; and after returning to the studio one squeezes the sponge, as Jules Dupré expressed it. Only after they had satiated themselves with the knowledge of truth, only after nature with all her individual phenomena had been interwoven with their inmost being, could they, without effort, and without the purpose of representing determined objects, paint from personal sentiment, and give expression to their humour, in the mere gratification of impulse. Thence comes their wide difference from each other. Painters who work according to fixed rules resemble one another, and those who aim at a distinct copy of nature resemble one another no less. But each one of the Fontainebleau painters, according to his character and his mood for the time being, received different impressions from the same spot in nature, and at the same moment of time. Each found a landscape and a moment which appealed to his sentiment more perceptibly than any other. One delighted in spring and dewy morning, another in a cold, clear day, another in the threatening majesty of storm, another in the sparkling effects of sportive sunbeams, and another in evening after sundown, when colours have faded and forms are dim. Each one obeyed his peculiar temperament, and adapted his technique to the altogether personal expression of his way of seeing and feeling. Each one is entirely himself, each one an original mind, each picture a spiritual revelation, and often one of touching simplicity and greatness: _homo additus naturæ_. And having dedicated themselves, more than all their predecessors, to personality creating in and for itself, they have become the founders of the new creed in art. That strong and firmly rooted master _Théodore Rousseau_ was the epic poet, the plastic artist of the Pleïades. "_Le chêne des roches_" was one of his masterpieces, and he stands himself amid the art of his time like an oak embedded in rocks. His father was a tailor who lived in the Rue Neuve-Saint Eustache, Nr. 4 _au quatrième_. As a boy he is said to have specially devoted himself to mathematics, and to have aimed at becoming a student at the Polytechnic Institute. Thus the dangerous, doctrinaire tendency, which beset him in his last years, of making art more of a science than is really practicable, and of referring everything to some law, lay even in his boyish tastes. He grew up in the studio of the Classicist Lethière, and looked on whilst the latter painted both his large Louvre pictures, "The Death of Brutus" and "The Death of Virginia." He even thought himself of competing for the _Prix de Rome_. But the composition of his "historical landscape" was not a success. Then he took his paint-boxes, left Lethière's studio, and wandered over to Montmartre. Even his first little picture, "The Telegraph Tower" of 1826, announced the aim which he was tentatively endeavouring to reach. [Illustration: _L'Art._ CAMILLE COROT.]