For the evening dusk, the hour after sunset, is peculiarly the hour of Corot; his very preference for the harmonious beauty of dying light was the effluence of his own harmonious temperament. When he would, Corot was a colourist of the first order. The World Exhibition of 1889 contained pictures of women by his hand which resembled Feuerbach in their strict and austere beauty of countenance, and which recalled Delacroix in the liquid fulness of tone and their fantastic and variously coloured garb. But, compared with the orgies of colour indulged in by Romanticism, his works are generally characterised by the most delicate reserve in painting. A bright silvery sheet of water and the ivory skin of a nymph are usually the only touches of colour that hover in the pearly grey mist of his pictures. As a man Corot avoided all dramas and strong contrasts; everything abrupt or loud was repellent to his nature. Thus it was that the painter, too, preferred the clear grey hours of evening, in which nature envelops herself as if in a delicate, melting veil of gauze. Here he was able to be entirely Corot, and to paint without contours and almost without colours, and bathe in the soft, dusky atmosphere. He saw lines no longer; everything was breath, fragrance, vibration, and mystery. "_Ce n'est plus une toile et ce n'est plus un peintre, c'est le bon Dieu et c'est le soir._" Elysian airs began to breathe, and the faint echo of the prattling streamlet sounded gently murmuring in the wood; the soft arms of the nymphs clung round him, and from the neighbouring thicket tender, melting melodies chimed forth like Æolian harps-- "Rege dich, du Schilfgeflüster; Hauche leise, Rohrgeschwister; Säuselt, leichte Weidensträuche; Lispelt, Pappelzitterzweige Unterbroch'nen Träumen zu." His end was as harmonious as his life and his art. "_Rien ne trouble sa fin, c'est le soir d'un beau jour._" His sister, with whom the old bachelor had lived, died in the October of 1874, and Corot could not endure loneliness. On 23rd February 1875--when he had just completed his seventy-ninth year--he was heard to say as he lay in bed drawing with his fingers in the air: "_Mon Dieu_, how beautiful that is; the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen." When his old housekeeper wanted to bring him his breakfast he said with a smile: "To-day Père Corot will breakfast above." Even his last illness robbed him of none of his cheerfulness, and when his friends brought him as he lay dying the medal struck to commemorate his jubilee as an artist of fifty years' standing, he said with tears of joy in his eyes: "It makes one happy to know that one has been so loved; I have had good parents and dear friends. I am thankful to God." With those words he passed away to his true home, the land of spirits--not the paradise of the Church, but the Elysian fields he had dreamt of and painted so often: "_Largior hic campos æther et lumine vestit purpureo._" [Illustration: _L'Art._