Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 94, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 April 1910 — Still Learning. [ARTICLE]

Still Learning.

Three weeks before his death, when he was nearly 80 years old, Corot, the painter, said to a friend: "You have no idea of the things I could paint now. I see what I have never seen before. It seems to me that I could never before have been able to make a sky. That which is before me Is much rosier, profounder, more trapsparent. Ah, If I could show you these Immense horizons!” In ''Corot and His Friends” Everard Meynell gives Albert Wolff’s picture of the aged artist. He wrote In 1884: Only nine years ago one could still, on summer days, see one of the most touching spectacles an artist has ever given to his time. An old man, come to the completion of a long life, his white hair aureoled in reflections, clothed In a blouse, sheltered under a parasol, sat, attentive as a scholar, trying to surprise some secret of nature that had escaped him for seventy years, smiling at the chatter of the birds, and now and then throwing them the bar of a song, as happy to live and enjoy the poetry of the fields as he had been at 20. Old as be was, this great artist still hoped to be learning; for half a century he had been studying the works of creation, and every day they made a revelation to him> for, thought this old man, there can never be an absolute mastery in art, and s lifetime Is not long enough to study all the expressions of the face of the earth. "Two good studies must be made,” he said, “or I will break my palette and brushes." And, later on, “I hope with all my heart there will be painting In heaven.”