vanguard in that glorious phalanx of French landscape painters, especially Paul Huet owed much to the example of English landscape painters and of Constable and Bonnington in particular; the masters were soon out-stripped by the pupils, and the painting of French landscapes attained a greatness unknown since Poussin and Claude Lorraine.
Barbizon at that time was a hamlet buried amid heaths and woods, scarcely so much as a village, without a church, without a burying-ground, without a post-office, a schoolhouse, a market or shops—even without a public-house: everything had to be fetched from Chailly, the nearest village. It had no visitors except a few artists, unknown at that time; and its inhabitants were wood-cutters and labourers poorly enough off. Alfred Sensier tells us the sort of life—half that of an artist, half that of a Trappist monk—that Rousseau led in this country place which was so near Paris, but at that time seemed so remote. Rousseau spent the autumns and winters alone in the dull, low and cold house of a wood-cutter; there he dreamed and created, undisturbed, having no companions but the crows
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