Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/620

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590 Painting engraver, then a pupil of David at Paris. He went very late to Italy, where he painted subjects of history mixed with the scenes of nature. Three of his most important works are in the Louvre — the Italian Improvisatore, the Feast of the Madonna di Pie-di-grotta, and the Harvest Feast in the Roman Campagna. In 1835 he painted the Departure of Fishing Boats in the Adriatic, in which he seems to foretell a departure without a return, and which he completed at Venice just before he ended his own life. Ary Scheffer (1795 — 1858), who was born at Dordrecht of French parents, had the misfortune when quite young to lose his father. His mother took him in 1811 to Paris, and apprenticed him to Pierre Guerin, from whom he learned his art, though he acquired but little of that master's style. His best works are the Francesco, di Rimini ; his Gaston de Foix found dead — now in the Gallery at Versailles — and the four subjects taken from Goethe's Faust; and his religious subjects — Christ the Comforter; S. Monica, and the Temptation of Christ. Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796 — 1875), one of the best of modern French landscape painters, was apprenticed to a draper, but determined to be a painter, and entered in 1822 the studio of Michallon. He afterwards went to Italy, where he applied himself diligently to study land- scape painting from nature. In 1827 appeared his first works, a View of Narni, and the Campagna of Borne ; in the Paris Exhibition of 1855 he exhibited Morning Effect and Evening, and in the same year received a first-class medal. These were followed by a succession of pictures which won him immense fame. " Corot was a poet, and his canvases are the expression of ideas, refined almost to sentimentality, full of fancy and imagination."