Once emancipated from the compulsions of drapery he lost no time in setting to work. He went straight to Nature, and even at this time produced work that bore a hall-mark as distinctive as that of his later years. He worked also in the studios of Michallon and of Bertin, and if they did him no good (and there is little reason to suppose such a thing), they at least did him no harm. Already he was too keenly engaged upon a line of his own.
Around Ville d'Avray, where his father had bought a house, he found numberless subjects ready to his hand, subjects of which nothing that he saw in his wide wanderings could ever make him tired. He also had an experience in Morvan. I shall venture to quote from Mr. Everard Meynell's "Corot and his Friends," concerning it. "He went, presently, to the little hamlet of Morvan, whose blacksmith gave him hospitality. As a member of a farrier's numerous family, with the forge for sitting-room, and its fires to assuage the cold of mortals and of metals, and soup for fuel, and the blue smock of the country for raiment, Corot saved money. He saved money out of the 1200 francs of his allowance; even the cost of canvas and paints did not bring his expenditure to three francs a day. His austerity meant Rome, but it was not a hard road for him to follow. Never was a man less provoked to any of the pampered ways of living."
"It was in Morvan that Corot picked up with the peasant, and found in him many things fit to be learned. He learnt about soups, and pipes, and blouses, and the habit of the sunrise; and nothing that he learned did he forget. Soups, and pipes, and blouses, and the sunrise lasted him till the end of his life. These things, like the honest humour and good-comradeship of a man afield, were in his blood; but Morvan and Morvan's blacksmith, and daily things done with the Morvan peasantry, developed the peasant in the painter. Corot's was nearer to the peasant's character than Millet's even; for the emotional gloom of Millet's outlook, his sense of the price paid for life, his sense of death and toil, of the significance of the seed and the scythe, made him a person too great and dreadful to be familiar with those for whom he thought and felt. Corot's laugh and song, his raillery and content, were things to be friends with."