ROUSSEAU, Pierre Etienne Theodore, French painter: b. Paris, 15 April 1812; d. Bar bizon, neat Fontainebleau, 22 Dec. 1867. He was a pupil of Remond (1826) and of Lethiere, but quickly parted company with all current theories of art, and showed himself an original interpreter of nature, while he fought the battle of the new landscape —epaywe through the 13 years during which his pictures were 'excluded from the Salon by the Academ ical Jury, which happily has since then been abolished. He traveled through the Auvergne and Normandy and painted the scenery with the main object of breathing human feeling into the colors and forms of external nature. He is the central figure of the Barbizon school and must be looked upon as the founder of the modern school of French landscape paint ing, as opposed to the Romanticism of Claude Lorraine, Poussist and their followers. It has been well said of him: occupied the high• est place because he was the most . perfebt master. The grand aspect of landscape and its tenderness are equally familiar to him. He ren• ders with the same mastery the smile of ova. tion- and its terrors; the broad open plain and the mysterious forest; the limpid, sun-bright sky or the heaping of the clouds put to flight by storms; - the tatrible aspects of landscapes or those replete with grace. He has under stood all, rendered all, with equal genius. The greatest contemporary painters have each a particular stamp, Corot painting the grace; Millet, the hidden voice; Jules Dupre, the ma jestic strength. Theodore Rousseau has been by turns as much a poet as Corot, as melan choly as Millet, as awful as Dupre;- he is the most complete, for he embraces landscape art absolutely D' • In 1848 be took up his. residence on the
edge of the forest of. Fontainebleau and derived most of his .inspiration from the surrounding scenery. How he drew the motif of his work from this environment is seen in the fine pic ture in the Metropolitan Museum, New York,