Excerpt from Early English and Barbizon Paintings Belonging to William H. Fuller to Be Sold at Public Sale at Chickering Hall on Friday Evening, February 25th: Introductory Note and Description of the Pictures by Frank D. Millet, N. A A man possessed of such a mind and view, possessed of a skilful hand, and with Fontainebleau forest for a model, could not but produce a strong art. For the first time in the history of French landscape the mirror was held up to nature. But the reflection was not the exact counterpart of the original. No great painter ever tries to show the facsimile, and Rousseau's art was nature - plus an individu ality. He had a sentiment about form, light, color, air, that can be felt in every one of his pictures. He saw truly enough, but he saw something more than the bare prosaic facts. Nature was a great poem to him, and all his life he was endeavoring to interpret it. His study was enormous, his labor prodigious; and yet his completed canvases are not so numerous as those of his fellow painters at Barbizon. Like Leonardo with his portrait of Mona Lisa, Rousseau was never satisfied with his work. He kept pictures for months, touching, retouching, patting, caressing them with the brush, trying to better them in every way. And this was not because he lacked in skill, but because he could never fully interpret the vision of truth he saw in the well. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.