He claimed for the artist an entire independence. "You must interpret nature with entire simplicity, and according to your personal sentiment, altogether detaching yourself from what you know of the old masters or of contemporaries. Only in this way will you do work of real feeling. I know gifted people who will not avail themselves of their power. Such people seem to me like a billiard-player, whose adversary is constantly giving him good openings, but who makes no use of them. I think that if I were playing with that man, I would say, 'Very well, then, I will give you no more.' If I were to sit in judgment, I would punish the miserable creatures who squander their natural gifts, and I would turn their hearts to cork." Again he says--"Follow your convictions. It is better not to exist than to be the echo of other painters. As the wise man says, if one follows, one is behind." And again--"Art should be an individual expression of the verities, an ardour that concedes nothing."
"Beauty in art is truth bathed in the impression, the emotion that is received from nature.... Seek truth and exactitude, but with the envelope of sentiment which you felt at first. If you have been sincere in your emotion you will be able to pass it on to others." So said Corot to a pupil, and "L'Etang" would in itself be sufficient to prove that he knew how to practise what he preached. It is a variant on a simple motive that he was never weary of, and that he knew how to invest with new beauties every time it came to him.]
It is on the face of it rather a hopeless task to attempt to trace the artistic pedigree of a painter who, at all costs, will be individual with "an ardour that concedes nothing"; and it would not help much towards an understanding of him. At the same time, it would be a mistake to suppose that Corot was quite so independent of the influences around as, perhaps, he imagined himself to be. "Artists," says Shelley in a notable utterance, "cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded."