At the very time when Watelet's metallic waterfalls and zinc trees were being drawn up in line, when the pupils of Bertin hunted the Calydonian boar, or drowned Zenobia in the waves of the Araxes, Rousseau, set free from the ambition of winning the _Prix de Rome_, was painting humble plains within the precincts of Paris, with little brooks in the neighbourhood which had nothing that deserved the name of waves. His first excursion to Fontainebleau occurred in the year 1833, and in 1834 he painted his first masterpiece, the "Côtés de Grandville," that picture, replete with deep and powerful feeling for nature, which seems the great triumphant title-page of all his work. A firm resolve to accept reality as it is, and a remarkable eye for the local character of landscape and for the structure and anatomy of the earth--all qualities revealing the Rousseau of later years--were here to be seen in their full impressiveness and straightforward actuality. He received for this work a medal of the third class. At the same time his works were excluded from making any further appearance in the Salon for many years to come. Concession might be made to a beginner; but the master seemed dangerous to the academicians. Two pictures, "Cows descending in the Upper Jura" and "The Chestnut Avenue," which he had destined for the Salon of 1835, were rejected by the hanging committee, and during twelve years his works met with a similar fate, although the leading critical intellects of Paris, Thoré, Gustave Planché, and Théophile Gautier, broke their lances in his behalf. Amongst the rejected of the present century, Théodore Rousseau is probably the most famous. At that period he was selling his pictures for five and ten louis-d'or. It was only after the February Revolution of 1848, when the Academic Committee had fallen with the _bourgeois_ king, that the doors of the Salon were opened to him again, and in the meanwhile his pictures had made their way quietly and by their unassisted merit. In the sequestered solitude of Barbizon he had matured into an artistic individuality of the highest calibre, and become a painter to whom the history of art must accord a place by the side of Ruysdael, Hobbema, and Constable. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ COROT. THE BRIDGE OF ST. ANGELO, ROME.]