conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Landscapes about STERLING, amp, FRANCINE with the genre: Travel, Reference.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: STERLING &amp; FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE - JUNE 16 - SEPT. 2, 2002
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Landscapes
  At the age of fifteen, Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time. His pictures attracted attention, and the increased number of those accepted each year proved the appreciation he received in spite of his extreme youth. In 1799, he became an Associate and three years later, when he was only twenty-seven years old, he was made a Member of the Royal Academy.
  Turner was a short, thickset man, unsociable, careless in his dress, and cared little about manners. He was incapable of expressing his ideas verbally and this caused him to become somewhat misanthropic. He was devoted to his work, rose early and remained at his task all day, resolutely refusing to receive visitors. As he worked easily, he was able to produce a great many pictures. His first works gave evidence of his keen observation of nature and of the influence exercised over him by the Flemish and Dutch masters he had studied in the English collections. He was, from the first, greatly fascinated by effects of light and shade. He painted seapieces very cleverly. There is a strong breeze blowing in this picture and the dramatic effect is well thought out. Side by side with these subjects obtained from nature, he also tried his hand at compositions inspired by mythology and the Bible. These, however, are merely episodes introduced afterwards, as neither the style nor the character of the landscape is in accordance with the subject. Turner merely saw in these subjects a pretext for purely decorative compositions which, more frequently than not, were borrowed from Claude Lorrain, who haunted Turner's mind at this time.
  As can readily be imagined, this was a branch of art likely to be appreciated by a maritime nation. It gave expression to the representation of a sight to be seen daily, the truthfulness of which could therefore be tested, and accordingly Turner's pictures were very much in favour among his fellow countrymen. By making a few concessions, and particularly by eliminating from his palette certain bituminous colours of which he was too fond, he might easily have made great progress. The vein he had struck was a good one and subjects would have been plentiful. Since he did not give up painting such episodes, they subsequently occupied a small place in his work. Instead of entering into closer communion with nature, by means of more continued study, he gave himself up to painting purely decorative effects. Turner's visit to France and Switzerland in 1802 may have had something to do with this transformation of his talent. He was certainly not inactive during this excursion to countries so different from his own. He brought a harvest of numerous studies back with him from the continent. But a series of rapid and extremely varied impressions could not have left very distinct and lasting memories. He was obliged, therefore, to be content with summary information and to have recourse to methods that were anything but thorough, in order to mask the insufficiency of his material. Hence he returned to the forms he already knew and to colour schemes devised from his palette, instead of taking advantage of the endless information with which nature would have supplied him.
  In the various pictures for which Turner could obtain the subjects in his own part of the world, nature itself afforded him all the assistance he needed and provided him with all the necessary details. He took more liberty with landscapes of foreign countries and with those which were completely imaginary, as he could then give his fancy free rein.
  It is almost inconceivable that anyone who could draw so admirably and who was so gifted, should, instead of improving himself in this branch of art, have launched out at a certain period of his career along quite other lines and expressed himself in such extraordinary colour schemes. It may have been that the requirements of constant production, for the sake of quick returns, induced Turner to content himself with studies that were less thorough. Turner had made an independent position for himself and not only was he well-to-do, but rich. In 1812, the artist bought a better house on Queen Anne Street, where he lived until his death, but without ever having any repairs or cleaning done to it. He lived in the midst of such dirt and disorder that his pictures, reared up against each other along the wall, gradually deteriorated.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Pierre Étienne Théodore Rousseau was born in Paris in 1812, sixteen years after Corot, and had quite different ideas in his manner of comprehending and depicting landscape. He was the son of a tailor from Salins-les-Bains in Jura, but his mother came of a family which boasted of its painters and sculptors. After beginning his education, Rousseau was sent to stay with some relatives in the country in Franche-Comté, for the sake of his health. Struck by the beauty around him, he tried to draw some of the scenery of this wild area. On his return to Paris, his father wanted him to enter the École Polytechnique, but the young man could not forget the charm of the country, and had a most ardent desire to become a landscapist. His parents allowed him to follow his inclinations. After spending a season at Compiègne with a painter, a cousin of his mother, Rousseau took his advice and entered the studio of Jean-Charles Joseph Rémond. Rémond was a pupil of Bertin's and one of the most qualified representatives of academic doctrines. Up to the very end of his long career – he died on the 15th of July, 1875, at the age of eighty – he drew his inspirations direct from nature, going either to the South of France, to Italy, or to Switzerland for the subjects of his pictures.
  In deference to his master, Rousseau at first obeyed all his instructions, even though they were not in accordance with his own ideas. He soon began to understand that the difference between the two styles open to him was too great, and that he could not work along these double lines. He therefore decided to separate from his master, and, in 1828 and 1829, he took up his abode at Moret on the banks of the Loing, and after that in the Chevreuse Valley.
  There he found the most picturesque and varied studies. What he painted during that time showed his evident sincerity. In the winter he returned to Paris and copied at the Louvre, chiefly from Claude Lorrain and Karel Dujardin. The struggle of the romantic school had already commenced around him, and Paul Huet and Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps were taking an active part in the fray. Rousseau, with his gentle, pacific disposition, was not the man for controversy. He lived apart and worked unceasingly, far enough away from the violent discussions. Alone in the great city, he felt more solitary than in the country.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Alfred Sisley (1840-1899) is an exception. In spite of the somewhat rough handling of his composition and of his summary drawing, Sisley sometimes expressed the radiation and vibration of light with harmonies and effects that had scarcely been attempted before him. One of the advantages that the initiative of the Impressionists has given us is lighter painting. Considering the darkness of winter and the poor lighting available in so many houses of the time, it was certainly better to substitute a fresher and more luminous representation of nature for the heavy tones of the preceding period, leaving to time alone the making of old pictures. Within just limits, the attempt of the reformers would have been approved. However, disdainful contempt for the art of the past, particularly for the qualities they did not possess themselves, and the presumption of their pretensions, was singularly out of proportion to the merit of their own works.
  It is not merely by audacity that a painter suddenly becomes a great artist. In the history of art we have frequent instances of the great obstacles that insufficient instruction has posed to the development of originality. We have only to compare the extreme diversity which we see in the works of the great masters with the monotony of slightly more contemporary innovators. We see in these summary sketches the conventions and the narrow, systematic formulae which these painters seemed to copy from each other.
  Art is no doubt old, but, although the more thorough knowledge and comprehension of the works of the past may have developed in us a critical mind which might shackle production, nature is older than art. In the sincere communion, whom those who love nature will never fail to demand, they may rest assured that, although everything may have been said before their day, everything remains yet to be said. The masterpieces which our predecessors have bequeathed to us are certainly innumerable, but the wealth of nature is infinite and we need not fear that the source from which they drew their inspirations will ever be exhausted.
  Triptych of the Sedano Family (left wing: Jean de Sedano and his son; central panel: The Virgin and Child between Angel Musicians; right wing: Marie, wife of Jean de Sedano, with St. John the Evangelist
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about However, completed.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Alfred Sisley (1840-1899) is an exception. In spite of the somewhat rough handling of his composition and of his summary drawing, Sisley sometimes expressed the radiation and vibration of light with harmonies and effects that had scarcely been attempted before him. One of the advantages that the initiative of the Impressionists has given us is lighter painting. Considering the darkness of winter and the poor lighting available in so many houses of the time, it was certainly better to substitute a fresher and more luminous representation of nature for the heavy tones of the preceding period, leaving to time alone the making of old pictures. Within just limits, the attempt of the reformers would have been approved. However, disdainful contempt for the art of the past, particularly for the qualities they did not possess themselves, and the presumption of their pretensions, was singularly out of proportion to the merit of their own works. 
  It is not merely by audacity that a painter suddenly becomes a great artist. In the history of art we have frequent instances of the great obstacles that insufficient instruction has posed to the development of originality. However, we do not know of any obstacles that have been the result of thorough instruction at an early age, completed later by the information which the landscapist can only obtain by a study of nature itself. We have only to compare the extreme diversity which we see in the works of the great masters with the monotony of slightly more contemporary innovators. We see in these summary sketches the conventions and the narrow, systematic formulae which these painters seemed to copy from each other. 
  Art is no doubt old, but, although the more thorough knowledge and comprehension of the works of the past may have developed in us a critical mind which might shackle production, nature is older than art. In the sincere communion, whom those who love nature will never fail to demand, they may rest assured that, although everything may have been said before their day, everything remains yet to be said. The masterpieces which our predecessors have bequeathed to us are certainly innumerable, but the wealth of nature is infinite and we need not fear that the source from which they drew their inspirations will ever be exhausted. 
  Triptych of the Sedano Family (left wing: Jean de Sedano and his son; central panel: The Virgin and Child between Angel Musicians; right wing: Marie, wife of Jean de Sedano, with St. John the Evangelist