Personal Recollections of Jean François Millet

THE recent death of Jean François Millet has suggested the following reminiscences of a period when the writer enjoyed somewhat exceptional opportunities of intercourse with the distinguished French painter; they are largely derived from letters written at the time, supplemented by a still vivid recollection of many circumstances.

I first saw the village of Barbison and made the acquaintance of Millet early in the month of October, 1855. Upon leaving the United States I had been given a letter to him by my friend William M. Hunt, then recently returned from a long residence in France, where for several years he had known Millet intimately. Indeed, the latter told me afterward that “ Hunt was the most intimate and best friend he had ever had.” I had caught from Mr. Hunt something of his own enthusiasm for the talent and character of his friend, and was anxious to put myself, if possible, under the instruction of one whom he esteemed so highly.

Accordingly, soon after my arrival in Paris, I went down to Barbison, where Millet resided, and — I quote from a letter written at the time — “ presently found myself in Millet’s atelier and in the presence of the great man. I had been told that he was a rough peasant ; but peasant or no peasant, Millet is one of Nature’s noblemen. He is a large, strong, deep-chested man, with a full black beard, a gray eye that looks through and through you, and, so far as I could judge during the moment when he took off a broad - brimmed, steeple-crowned straw hat, a high rather than a broad forehead. He made me think at once of Michael Angelo and of Richard Cœur de Lion.”

After presenting my letter and answering a few questions about our common friend, I proceeded to the object of my visit, and expressed my desire to become Millet’s pupil, or at least to have his advice as to my future course. I had brought with me a few drawings and studies in oil as specimens of my proficiency; these he examined with interest, and criticised courteously but freely. Other visitors now coming in, I took my leave, promising to return after I had taken a stroll about the environs.

Returning to the inn at noon, I found the table set for a déjeuner à la fourchette, and I sat down with the other guests, about twenty in number, mostly young men, and all apparently artists. The conversation was animated and noisy. I ate my meal for a while silent and unnoticed, doing my best to understand the jokes every one but myself seemed to enjoy so heartily, but at last I unwittingly attracted the attention of the whole company. On the appearance of a second course, thinking I had been overlooked by the inn-keeper’s daughter, who was the only attendant, I stopped her as she passed my seat, and pointed to my plate, intimating my wish to be furnished with another. The girl seemed very much startled at my movement and before I could make her understand what I wanted a shout of derision arose from the whole table. “ Ha, l’aristocrate! ” they cried; “ il veut changer d’assiette.” I had, it appeared, committed a solecism. I had shocked the proprieties of the Hôtel Ganne. I had been guilty of a breach of good manners;

Copyright, H O HOUGHTON & Co 1876

I had insulted the great democracy of art. I hastened to retrieve my error, and apologized as well as I could, pleading my foreign birth and education as an excuse for my ignorance of good manners; while as for the charge of being an aristocrat, I assured the company that as I happened to have been born and bred a citizen of the great democratic republic, such a thing was simply impossible. My explanation was taken in good part, and we finished our meal on the most amicable terms.

The inn where I breakfasted in such good company is quite a curiosity in its way. Upon the paneled walls and doors, as well as upon sideboards and other furniture, upon every available space, in fact, are innumerable sketches, many of them painted long ago by young rapins who have since become famous artists. These paintings are mentioned in all the guide-books now, and the Hôtel Ganne is one of the lions which strangers are perforce taken to see.

Breakfast over, I returned to Millet’s atelier and resumed my interrupted conversation with him. He could not, he said, receive me as a pupil; it had never been his custom, and it would be very inconvenient to have any one working with him in his atelier. However, if I chose to take a room in Barbison, I might bring my work to him, and he would advise and direct me as best he could. But if I wished to study the human figure, he thought I could do that better in Paris, where I could have models, etc. All this was not very encouraging; in fact, I got the impression that Millet intended to dissuade me from the idea of studying with him, and I returned to Paris that evening half determined to abandon the whole project. But, notwithstanding the reluctance he had shown to receive me as a pupil, I felt more than ever attracted to him. I accepted his criticisms and the little encouragement he had given me as evidences of his frankness and sincerity. He had said exactly what he thought, because he had been asked to do so. He had spoken the truth, because it was the truth. I was, moreover, captivated by the personality of the man, — his handsome, intelligent, honest face, the grand dignity of his manner, the serious charm of his conversation.

I soon made a second visit to Barbison, when I found Millet, as I thought, rather more disposed to encourage my plan than he had been at our first interview; and after a long conversation it was finally settled that I should establish myself at Barbison and begin drawing under his instruction, he coming to my room to see and correct whenever I had anything ready to show him. For this, he said, he should be obliged to charge me a very high price, as his time was valuable. He said this, I half suspected, as a last attempt to deter me from the scheme; and when he mentioned this formidable sum, which was one hundred francs, or twenty dollars, per month, and found I was not in the least staggered by it, he looked, I thought, a little disappointed.

This important preliminary settled, he interested himself about a room for me, first warning me that I must not expect very magnificent accommodations, and telling me that on account of the dampness of the floors I would do well to adopt the Barbison fashion of wearing wooden shoes, especially in the house. Then, summoning his servant, a maid of all work (who also, as I afterward learned, often sat or stood as a model for his peasant women), and mentioning the names of several of the neighbors who, he thought, would have rooms to let, he told her to go with me to look at them.

My guide had not far to go. Two doors from Millet’s house I found a room that seemed to be all that was required. Within a week I was installed in my new quarters, where, with occasional visits to Paris, I remained through the winter and spring, from the 29th of October to the 23d of June. During this long sojourn I not only saw a good deal of Millet, but became familiar with Barbison and interested in the life of its inhabitants.

Millet was a poet as well as a painter; or rather, his painting is poetry: each of his pictures is a poem, and though the main topics may be of general interest, appealing to the universal heart of man, his works are full of local color. His peasants are not generalized abstractions. He painted what he saw about him—French scenery and French men and women; and some acquaintance with these may help to give a fuller appreciation of his genius.

Barbison can hardly claim the distinction of being even a village, since it has neither church nor church-yard, nor school - house, nor post-office. For all these things its inhabitants must go a mile and a half to the neighboring town of Chailly, itself hardly more than a large village, of which Barbison is a mere dependency or suburb. There were no shops and no tradesmen in Barbison in my time, no market-place, no common centre of village life, no village tavern even; for though there were two inns in the place, they seemed to be monopolized by the artists, at least in summer, and were rarely visited by the villagers. Even the butcher and the baker came from Chailly, as well as the charcutier, — or dealer in pork, whether fresh or cured, — who is always, in France, a distinct person from the butcher proper. People might be born in Barbison if they would, but when they died they must be taken to Chailly to be buried;¹ if they were sick they must send to Chailly for a physician, and there they must go

This hamlet, rather than village, at the time of my visit (it has not changed much since) consisted of a single street, a little more than half a mile in length, running nearly east and west in a slightly winding line. The street had no sidewalks, but its whole surface, twenty-five or thirty feet in width, was paved with square blocks of stone, in excellent repair and neatly kept. In fact, the inhabitants prided themselves upon their neatness, and looked down with contempt upon the other villages in the neighborhood where cleanliness was not held in so high esteem. Both sides of the way were lined with houses built directly upon the thoroughfare, at short intervals apart, the spaces between the houses being closed by high walls, so that the street was completely shut in throughout its whole extent. Both walls and houses were built of stone, usually covered with rough-cast and most of them whitewashed. The dwellings were generally of one story, never of more than two, some presenting their gable ends and some their sides to the street, upon which very few opened directly. The entrance was usually by a wide gateway in the wall which joined one house to the next.

A few of the older houses still retained their thatched roofs, in a picturesque state of decay, and overspread with great patches of green moss; but, owing to the danger of their taking fire, thatched roofs had been for some years interdicted by the government. The old ones were allowed to remain so long as by patching they could be made to hold together, but when it became necessary to renew them, it must be with tiles and not with straw.

On these thatched roofs, and even in the interstices of the tiles, the seeds of weeds and wild flowers had found a lodgment, and in the spring the walls and roofs were in many places gay with blossoms. A part of the house in which I lived had one of these ancient roofs of thatch, whose straw, gray and crumbling with age, was almost wholly hidden under great flakes of moss, upon which two or three pairs of white pigeons were usually to be seen strutting to and fro or dozing lazily in the sun. Against the street front of many of the houses on the sunny side of the way grapevines — the famous Chasselas de Fontainebleau — were growing upon trellises, not for ornament but for profit. With this exception there was nothing that had even the appearance of an attempt at outward embellishment.

The stranger, however, who should do no more than traverse the village street would gain but a very imperfect idea of Barbison. Only by entering some gateway that chanced to be left open, and penetrating into the cour within, would he be able to get even an outside view of the homes of the people. He would then find himself in an inclosure formed by the dwelling-house on one side and by ranges of out-buildings or high stone walls on the other three, with perhaps — though this was often wanting—a narrow paved walk leading to the real entrance to the house. In the middle there usually stood during the winter a manure heap of constantly growing proportions, affording an ever - fresh field for the explorations of a score of industrious fowls. In one corner, perhaps, would be the well, with its stone curb and oaken bucket; under a rough shed, thatched with furze or brush, the family wood-pile or a disorderly assemblage of carts and agricultural implements; while through the open door of the grange one might discern men at work threshing or winnowing grain. It was in this cour that the cows were milked, the horses groomed, the sheep sheared at the proper season; here the children played and the women performed many of their domestic duties.

In the rear of this inclosure, and guarded apparently with even greater jealousy from the public eye, was often a garden, surrounded by high walls, planted with fruit-trees and vines, vegetables and flowers, and having a postern gate, as it were, to the little citadel of the peasant’s home, opening directly upon the great Plain.

Millet’s residence and atelier, of one story, with a tiled roof, stood with its gable end toward the street, upon which it had only one small window, — not counting another in an out-building used as the kitchen. On entering the gate the visitor found that the usual cour had been transformed into a garden, of which all that I remember distinctly is a square plot of ground in the middle, where, one day in the early spring, I found Millet at work spading, as a remedy, he told me, for dyspepsia. He delighted to exercise himself occasionally in the labors familiar to his youth, and in which as a young man he had excelled. He would often, in his walks around Barbison, borrow for a moment of some laborer, whom he found at work in the fields, the implement he was using, and prove to the astonished peasant his superior skill in handling it. He had, indeed, a practical acquaintance with every kind of agricultural labor and every species of rural handiwork, and there was in this same garden a small stone building roofed with straw which, aided only by his brother Pierre, he had built and thatched with his own hands.

The atelier occupied the whole of a detached building, which stood in a corner of the garden next the street and opposite the house. It had been built a few years before, expressly for Millet’s use, by the owner of the estate, of which Millet was the lessee. In outward appearance it resembled the ordinary barn or grange attached to most houses at Barbison, differing only in its large window, which looked directly upon the street. The interior consisted of one large, high room, with what was very unusual at Barbison, a wooden, not a brick floor. Across the lower part of the wide window was stretched a green curtain; near it stood an iron stove, the easel at which Millet worked, and a modelingstand for the use of his brother Pierre. Upon shelves about the room or standing upon the floor with their faces turned to the wall were piles of canvases, new and old, of all sizes; many of them, as I afterward discovered, pictures in various stages of progress, some of which had not been touched for years. In a corner near the door was a calico-covered couch, and near it a table with writing materials and a somewhat disorderly assemblage of books, papers, crayons, brushes, and colors, the usual litter of an atelier. Several other easels stood about the room, upon which Millet would place the pictures he wished to show to visitors. But they were usually vacant; for though he might have two or three pictures on the stocks — sur le chantier as he said, —at the same time, he preferred to have in sight only the one he was for the moment at work upon.

The walls of the room were unpapered and unstained; there was no attempt at what is called decoration, and the general aspect was certainly somewhat untidy and neglected. Everything was for use, not for show; a few casts from the friezes of the Parthenon and the Column of Trajan which hung in the embrasure of the window, a few busts and small plaster figures which stood near, were not there for ornament, but, like maps and encyclopædias in a library, for constant reference. It was an atelier, a place for work, not an exhibition room nor the cabinet of a virtuoso.

Upon some shelves in one corner was what Millet called his museum: a collection of rags and bits of cloth, of different colors, faded and weather-stained, fragments of head-handkerchiefs (marmottes), blouses, petticoats, etc., affording shades of color more exquisite than any dyer could produce. Millet, made great use of these in his painting, taking from them suggestions of color which he said he could have got in no other way. The almost innumerable shades of blue, from the dark indigo of the new blouse or apron that had never been washed to the delicate tints of time-worn garments that had been bleached almost to whiteness, were his especial delight. Blue, he once told me, was his favorite color; and without doubt it occurs more frequently than any other in the costumes of his peasants.

A door or two from Millet’s lived the painter, Charles Jacque. He also had a large-windowed atelier looking upon the street, and the door of his house was one of the few in Barbison that opened directly upon the pavement. Upon this door the gamins of the village, who for some reason seemed to bear the poor artist a bitter grudge, were in the habit of writing, with chalk, insulting inscriptions, such as “Jacque est bête,” often curiously misspelled. These and other indignities were warmly resented by the painter, and I was once, at least, witness to a prolonged altercation in the open street, before and close to my window, between Jacque and his wife on one side and a crowd of boys, reënforced by their mothers, on the other, in which the choicest epithets were hurled back and forth with deafening volubility.

The western portion of the village was occupied chiefly by the poorer class of the inhabitants; but quite at the western extremity was a notable exception. Here, disposed in a hollow square and surrounded by high walls, was a cluster of buildings belonging to a large farm, while outside, on the Plain, stood a picturesque group of gigantic hay-stacks and grain ricks. The proprietor, said to be the richest man in the place, one of the class of peasant farmers represented by the Boaz of Millet’s picture, Ruth and Boaz, or the Harvesters (Les Moissonneurs),² had between two and three hundred acres of land under cultivation, and employed a large number of hands, both men and women. A dozen horses were kept on the premises, besides a large flock of sheep, and barn-yard fowls and pigeons almost innumerable. The farm was one of the lions of the place; and its stables and poultry yard, as well as the interior of the dwelling-house, afforded the artists ample materials for studies.

A short distance beyond the eastern extremity of the village was the Porte aux Vaches, or Cow Gate, the nearest entrance to the Forest of Fontainebleau, where, during the grazing season, the cows owned in Barbison were usually pastured, in accordance with a prescriptive right enjoyed by all the inhabitants of the commune. The cattle were under the charge of a man whose sole business it was to watch them, and who was paid pro rata by their owners. Every morning about nine o’clock the bouvier or vacher, as he was called, Anglicè cowherd, came through the village street, blowing a horn. At the sound, every good-wife who had a cow to be pastured hastened to open the door of her cow-house as well as the entrance gate of her courtyard, and the cow, knowing the sound as well as her mistress, needed no further invitation to march out and join the long procession of her bovine friends as it filed past. The cowherd, accompanied by his dog, and with his wallet containing his dinner slung over his shoulder, brought up the rear; and passing through the gate to which they gave its name, herd and herdsman disappeared in the Forest. There they roamed about all day, cropping the grass in the open glades, or reposing at noon under the branching oaks in the dortoir, a part of the Forest so called from its being the favorite nooning-place. At nightfall the procession was re-formed and wended its way back to the village. Once more the bouvier sounded his horn, all the good-wives set wide open their gates and stable doors, and each cow, as she reached her home, turned in, without bidding, at the well-known gate. One of Millet’s pictures, entitled Vacher rappellant ses Vaches, of which I have seen a photograph, appears to represent the scene in the Forest when the cowherd calls together his cows preparatory to their return home.

Millet never made one of the almost innumerable company of artists who, during the summer months, spread themselves over the Forest, dotting the sylvan shade with their white umbrellas. He never felt, he told me, the necessity of making out-of-door studies from nature, though he sometimes made rough notes, as it were, in a pocket sketchbook no bigger than his hand. He could, he said, fix any scene he desired to remember so perfectly in his memory as to be able to reproduce it with all the accuracy desirable. And certainly many a bit of landscape in his pictures recalls so exactly the scenery around Barbison that it is difficult to believe it was not painted directly from nature. He was fond, however, of making excursions in the Forest, and knew all the finer parts of it by heart, though he did not at the time of my visit take as much exercise in that way as he might have done with advantage to his health.

But though Millet did not feel impelled to make special landscape studies in the Forest, he did not neglect what may be called its human interests. He has painted the poor old women whom the law allows to gather dry sticks in the government woodlands, or even to break off and carry away such dead limbs as they can reach. This refuse wood they bind into enormous bundles, which they hoist painfully upon their backs and so stagger home, bent nearly double beneath their heavy burden. There was said to be a rivalry among the aged crones of Barbison as to who should carry the largest fagot; and one of them, who died during my stay, was reported to have hastened her death by her misplaced ambition.

The wood-cutters also furnished him with subjects. Almost every able-bodied male inhabitant of Barbison worked occasionally at this occupation, in the employ of the government, and many of them were said to have acquired a remarkable skill in the use of the ax, or perhaps, rather, to have inherited it, for the traditions of the craft have been handed down from father to son through a hundred generations.

Millet’s picture of La Mort et le Bûcheron was not painted until several years after I had left Barbison, but the subject had already been long in his mind. One day in my room he took up a copy of George Sand’s Mare au Diable, and read attentively the first chapter, in which the author describes at length an engraving after Holbein, underneath which was inscribed this quatrain in old French: —

The engraving was described as representing an old peasant plowing, while Death, in the guise of a skeleton, stalks beside the affrighted horses and urges them on with his whip.

Laying down the book, Millet said he had long been thinking of painting something like this; or rather, he thought it would be the old fable, so admirably told by La Fontaine, of Death and the WoodCutter. The picture so long in contemplation was finally painted in 1859, but, I know not on what grounds, was refused admission to the salon of that year. It was, however, engraved for the Gazette des Beaux Arts (vol. ii., 1859), and finally formed part of Millet’s contribution to the Exposition Universelle of 1867.

With Madame Sand’s view of the purpose of art, as expressed in this chapter, I understood him to say that he agreed in a general way; so far at least as to hold that its mission is one of love and not of hatred; that in showing us the sorrows of the poor it ought not to stir up enmity against the rich, least of all to use the poor man, as some of the old artists seem to have used the image of Death, as a means of terrifying the more favored classes into being just and compassionate toward their less fortunate brethren. But he thought that she, in putting her theories into practice, had fallen into the error of making her peasants plus beaux que nature, better than they really were, casting around them the glamour of a poetry of her own invention and failing to discover that which really inheres in them and in their daily life, if one could only learn to see it.

Subjects for Millet’s pencil were also supplied by the workmen in the quarries excavated in the rocky ledges which intersect the Forest like miniature ranges of mountains, and whence is taken the stone used in paving the streets of Paris. Allusion is made to the severe nature of their toil in a published letter of Millet’s,³ and we may imagine him to have been, at the time he wrote it, engaged upon a picture which was among those sold after his death under the title, Les Carriers. One picture at least Millet has painted, the scene of which is in the Forest, and in which man plays no part. It is called, in the catalogue of the sale of his pictures which took place in Paris after his death,⁴ Rabbits in the Gorges d’Apremont at Sunrise. The locality mentioned is a rocky defile in the Forest, only a short distance from the village, and a favorite haunt of the wild rabbit. The picture is now owned in Boston.

But though Millet with his fine artistic and sensitive nature could not fail to appreciate the charms of the unrivaled Forest, he found in the great Plain that lies around Barbison a greater variety of subjects that appealed strongly to his sympathies as a man and as an artist. The Plain was more exclusively the domain of the peasant, the scene of his labors, the nucleus of the life Millet, had himself lived and which he felt himself constrained to paint.

Upon all sides of Barbison save one, where the Forest hems it in, the Plain stretches almost literally as far as the eye can reach, rising occasionally into gentle undulations, and dotted here and there with detached groups of rocks and trees and widely scattered villages, but presenting a generally level and open surface. There are no isolated farmhouses, as with us, and no stone walls, fences, or hedges, except immediately around the villages; and were it not all evidently under cultivation, the Plain might be taken for a vast common. In many of its features it resembles the Roman Campagna, and its great extent and generally level surface are vaguely suggestive of the sea, inspiring the same comparison between the littleness of the individual man and the vastness of the universe. One realizes there that the earth is round, a fact which the artist who studies chiefly in close woods or surrounded by houses is apt to forget. “ Every landscape, however small,” Millet once said to me, “ should contain a suggestion of the possibility of its being indefinitely extended on either side; every glimpse of the horizon, however narrow, should be felt to be a segment of the great circle that bounds our vision. The observance of this rule helps wonderfully to give to a picture the true out-of-doors look.”

. I know not how those may be affected who have not seen the actual localities, but for my part I can never look at one of Millet’s pictures where the scene is laid in the Plain without feeling, as it were, the whole vast amphitheatre rise around me. I not only see the special scene set before me, but am also vaguely conscious of a hundred other things on each side and behind me; things which no doubt were also in Millet’s mind as he painted the picture. It is not to me an isolated fact that I look at, but, as Millet no doubt intended it to be, a part of a great whole, a canto of the poem, one stanza of the song.

The work of plowing or digging the fields before sowing seemed to go on almost without interruption through the winter. The plows, each drawn invariably by two horses, were to a Yankee eye exceedingly heavy and clumsy, although on that account all the more picturesque. Many of the fields, however, were so small and of such a shape that a plow could not be used upon them; or perhaps the proprietor was too poor to own or hire a plow and horses. In fact, there were very few of these implements owned or used at Barbison, except upon the one great farm. The small cultivators, instead of plowing, dug their fields over with a spade (bêche), whence those who performed the operation were called bêcheurs. Preparatory to this, however, and even when the plow was to be used afterward, the fields were cleared of stubble, bushes, etc., by means of an instrument called a houe, a sort of hoe, but more resembling a carpenter’s adze, though much larger and heavier, the blade being as broad as that of a shovel. It seems a clumsy tool, and it is very fatiguing to use.

Les Bêcheurs have formed the subject and given the title to more than one of Millet’s pictures. There is something very fascinating in the monotonous rise and fall of the heavy hoe, reminding one of the regular swinging to and fro of the scythe in mowing, especially since, as in mowing, the laborers usually work in pairs. Millet must have been attracted, too, by the unconscious grace, or, which is perhaps the same thing, the natural fitness of the attitudes and movements of the laborer. By long practice the bêcheur or houeur learns to place himself instinctively in the position best adapted for the effort he has to make, whether in raising his implement, in delivering the blow, or in turning the loosened earth. He learns, too, to use just so much effort as is needed and no more; he cannot afford to waste his strength. Force well ordered, well directed, calm, without bustle or excitement, not to be diverted from its aim; that was what Millet loved, and it was what he was. Again, none of the tasks which fall to the lot of the French peasant have a more pathetic significance than that of the bêcheur; none speak more plainly of the poverty, the hardship, the helplessness of his lot. And Millet, no doubt, always turned instinctively toward the pathetic aspects of human life.

All through November, and even later, men and women — and more women than men — might be seen digging potatoes and other root-crops. These they collected in large sacks and carried home on their backs, while the tops were tied up in large bundles and transported in the same way to serve as fodder for cattle or sheep. I do not remember seeing any work of Millet’s representing such a scene; though in the catalogue of the sale above referred to I find La Récolte des Pommes de Terre (The Potato Harvest), and he appears to have exhibited in 1867 a picture with the same title, perhaps the same picture, together with another entitled Planteurs de Pommes de Terre.

It was customary at Barbison to allow the land to he fallow once in three years, and the fields annually set apart for this purpose served as a pasture for the three or four flocks of sheep that were kept in the village.

The breed of dogs which takes its name from the old province La Brie was that generally employed at Barbison to watch the sheep. They were wiry, foxy little fellows, generally black with a tan spot over each eye, with a sharp nose and pointed ears; not pretty to look at, but indefatigably active and wonderfully intelligent. To one coming from New England, where the annual loss of sheep by dogs is so great as almost to have put an end to sheep-raising in localities where it was once the principal occupation, it seemed strange to see dogs the guardians and protectors of the sheep instead of their most dreaded enemies. A partial explanation may be found in the fact that in France the shepherd’s dog is never allowed to eat meat, least of all mutton; his master himself rarely indulges in such luxuries, and the rinsings of the family soup-kettle afford the only modification of the dog’s strictly vegetable diet.

The sheep at Barbison and in Millet’s pictures are of no choice and valuable breeds, but very ordinary animals, worthless almost, the sheep fancier might call them, whether for their flesh or for their fleeces. They were for that very reason better fitted for the artist’s purpose, were all the more typical sheep, more in harmony with the peasants who owned them and the nature around them. There are no subjects which Millet has more frequently chosen than sheep and shepherds. Sometimes it is the shepherd wending his way slowly homeward in the gloaming, his figure coming up darkly against the evening sky, followed by the long, winding column in serried ranks, one faithful dog bringing up the rear, whilst the other walks sedately by his master’s side, watching for a sign or word of command, or for an approving glance. Again, the shepherd, wrapped in his cloak, stands leaning on his staff, under the leafless trees at the edge of a wood, at the chill close of an autumn day, watching for the appearance of the &$233;toile du berger as the longed-for signal to lead homeward his flock. Or, again, the scene is a sheep shearing, as in one of his most remarkable pictures, now in the Athenæum gallery.

On these fallow fields cows, too, were often pastured, under the charge of children, whose duty it was to watch them and keep them within bounds. More commonly, however, a rope was attached by one end to the cow’s horns, while the other was held by a young girl, or sometimes an old woman, who, while restraining and guiding her four-footed companion, managed also to knit or sew. I have often seen a young woman leading in this way two cows, a halter being thrown over each arm, while both hands were busily employed in knitting.

An anecdote is told of one of the many pictures in which Millet has paint ed cows and cowherds which illustrates the importance to a full understanding of his works of some acquaintance with the country and the life they represent. The scene of the picture was laid in the Plain of Barbison: in the foreground was a woman pasturing her cow, while in the distance the bouvier of a neighboring village was seen conducting home his charge from their pasture in the Forest. In this herd of village cows some hotheaded socialist, who knew nothing of the local usages, at once recognized “ the pampered beasts of some lordly aristocrat,” and forthwith proceeded to make bitter comparisons between “ the rich man’s hundred head of kine ” and “ the poor widow’s solitary heifer.”

The biblical character of Millet’s pictures has often been remarked. A faithful representation of many of the scenes I saw in and around Barbison could hardly have any other character, especially to the unfamiliar eye of a stranger and that stranger coming from the New World. Many of the images that illustrate so profusely the sacred writings, and which to us are mere figures of speech, are in the old countries of Europe, as well as in the East, actual facts. When you see the sower go forth to sow in the uninclosed fields, you understand how some of the seed might easily fall by the wayside; and when you see women and children weeding the green grain, a new light is cast upon the parable of the tares that choked the wheat. On the Plain of Barbison, as in Palestine, the shepherd still leads his sheep, and the sheep know his voice: still, at certain seasons, the shepherds abide in the fields at night, watching their flocks. The gleaners still follow the reapers amid the wheat, and in Millet’s picture of Ruth and Boaz the story is told, with no violation of probability, as happening in a French harvest field. You may give it the Scripture title or call it Les Moissonneurs with equal propriety.

There was much in Millet himself suggestive of the Bible and of the old patriarchs, especially to those who saw him in the privacy of his home; at least it so appeared to me on the occasion of my first introduction to his family. One day, when I had been about a month at Barbison, he said to me, “ Si vous voulez venir vous chauffer avec nous quelquefois le soir, cela nous fera plaisir; si toutefois cela vous est agréable.” I was very glad to accept the invitation, and did not allow many days to elapse before presenting myself, one evening, at Millet’s house. I was ushered into a rather large but low room, very plainly furnished, where I found the family sitting around a large table in front of an open wood fire. There were, so far as I remember, no pictures of any kind upon the walls, nor any attempt at ornament; none of the knickknacks and objects of virtu which most artists think it so essential to gather around them. There was a lamp on the table, at which Millet was reading as I entered, while his brother Pierre was engaged in drawing. Opposite sat Madame Millet with her sewing, and beside her, with her knitting in her hand, the maid of all work who had answered my knock. The eldest daughter, a girl of about ten, was also present, but not long after my arrival, at a sign from her mother, she slipped quietly into a corner behind my chair, and when, attracted by a slight rustling sound, I involuntarily half turned my head, I saw that she had climbed upon a bed, whose presence in the room I had not before noticed. I had a momentary vision of a slim figure in a long white garment which suddenly collapsed and disappeared under the coverlid, beneath which, I think, one or more of the other children were already asleep.

“ This,” I wrote at the time in a letter describing the scene, “ will give you some idea of the primitive manners of the household. I could not help fancying myself, not in a house in France and in the nineteenth century, but far away in some remote age and country; under the tent, perhaps, of Abraham the shepherd. Millet, himself, in fact, looks as though he had been taken bodily out of the Bible.”

Millet, who was at that time in his fortieth year, had four children: three girls, of the respective ages of ten, eight, and four, and a boy of about six. Another daughter was born to him a few months later. On this, my first visit, Madame Millet took but little part in the conversation; but at other times I found her by no means indisposed to talk, especially of herself, her children, and her housekeeping. She was a farmer’s-wife sort of body, brisk and active though no longer young. I was told she was an excellent woman and was a good wife to Millet. I think she regarded him as a being of superior order to herself, as indeed in many respects he was, while I shall never forget the tenderness of the tone with which I have heard him address her as ܜma vieille,” nor the affectionate gesture with which I have seen him lay his hand upon her shoulder.

Throughout all my intercourse with him, Millet’s manner to me was uniformly courteous and kind; there was even a sort of geniality and cordiality about it, tempered, however, and held in check, as it were, by the native dignity and seriousness which characterized alike his appearance and his words. A slight hesitancy in his speech contributed perhaps somewhat to this impression, which was still further strengthened by a certain slowness and deliberation in all his movements. I felt myself at once attracted and not so much repelled as gently held at a distance. Even after had been several months at Barbison I wrote home, —

“ Millet is not, however, one of those with whom it is easy to make acquaintance. He does not let himself out to the first comer. Although the most kind - hearted of men and very gay at times, there is always a sort of grand dignity about him which checks familiarity.”

But Millet had a great deal of humor, which he also appreciated in others. He repeated to me with evident enjoyment, a bon mot of Barye, the sculptor, apropos of the new Louvre, then just completed: “ C’est de la haute confiserie,” alluding to the sugar-like whiteness and profuse ornamentation of the edifice.

I had, according to his suggestion, provided myself with a pair of wooden shoes; in fact, with two pairs: one the ordinary sabot worn by the peasants, the other of somewhat lighter and more elegant make. This seemed to cause Millet much amusement; and on my explaining that I intended the first pair for common use and the other for extraordinary occasions, “ Ah,” said he, “ je comprends; ce sont des sabots pour aller dans le monde.”

Agreeably to the terms of our compact, Millet came from time to time to my room; whenever, in fact, I told him I had anything to show him. He had advised me to begin with drawing from casts, and had spoken of the statue in the Louvre known as the Achilles, as being to him the perfection of manly beauty. He also recommended the Silenus with the Infant Bacchus, the Venus de Milo, and some others. I was not able to procure a reduced copy of the Achilles, and got instead a Germanicus, which Millet hailed as an old acquaintance. When he was studying, he said, with Paul Delaroche, every pupil in the atelier was obliged to make a drawing from the Germanicus once a fortnight. “ It was too much,” he added; “ we all got very tired of it.” As he remained five years with Delaroche it may be concluded that he knew that figure at least by heart.

In criticising my drawings he often took up the crayon and showed me what he meant by saying that every line, every touch, should have a meaning, a purpose; that the form of an object was defined by the shadow thrown upon it; or demonstrated how easy it was to imitate, on a flat piece of paper, the appearance of rotundity. The great thing, he said, was to learn to see things as they are. “ To see is to draw.” This was a favorite axiom of Millet’s; he was constantly repeating it under various forms.

“ His idea of the art of drawing is that it consists not so much in handling the pencil as in seeing the object to be drawn. If you can see it rightly you must draw it rightly. He constantly urges upon me the necessity of explaining to myself (me rendre compte) why a thing appears thus and so. Is it because it is round or square—because it advances or recedes? ”

At another time he said, “ Seeing is to drawing what reading is to writing. You may teach a boy to make all the letters of the alphabet with perfect accuracy, but unless he first learn to read he will never be able to write.”

I must have been dull indeed not to have learned something from his criticisms and corrections, the rapid but not careless sketches he would sometimes make on the margin of my paper, and, perhaps more than all, the long conversations we had together afterward, when, warmed by some favorite topic, he would often talk for an hour or more, most eloquently, as it seemed to me, and with a propriety of language, a fitness in the choice of words, remarkable in one born and bred a peasant. This was in part accounted for by a fact which I soon discovered, namely, that Millet was a great reader; often sitting up past midnight, his brother told me, devouring some volume he had picked up in Paris, where, on his occasional visits, he never failed to patronize the book-stalls. He had read the lives of all the great painters, knew a good deal about Shakespeare and Milton, and had even read translations of passages from Channing and Emerson.

This habit of reading was begun by him at a very early age. In the old homestead in Normandy there was a by no means contemptible collection of books of all kinds. Some had been the property of one of the family who had been a priest; others had belonged to a relative of the mother of Millet’s father, a man of learning, a member of the Institute and professor of chemistry and physics, whose name, Jean - Baptiste Jumelin, may be found in biographical dictionaries. A pious grandmother was careful that good books should always be lying in the children’s way; the boy Millet eagerly devoured them all. Nor were books the only influences at work in molding the future artist. The allied families, the Millets and the Jumelins, though classed as peasants, were rather what we should call independent yeomen, cultivating their own lands, that had descended from father to son through a long line of ancestors, from whom they had also inherited what they far more highly prize — an untarnished name, a grand reputation for honesty and industry, integrity and piety. As far back as memory or tradition reached, they had been held in all the country round as the very types of probity and sterling worth. They took a pride which was hereditary in the orderly management of their farms, the decent aspect of their dwellings, in their taste and skill in rural handiwork; they were not insensible to the beauty of the scenery around them, and could appreciate the grandeur of the neighboring ocean. Constructive if not artistic skill they had, as one of the race testified by making of wood, with no tool but a knife, a timepiece that for a hundred years marked with accuracy not only the hours and minutes, but also the days, months, and years as they passed.

In all Millet’s advice to me on the subject of my drawings he constantly insisted upon “ more deliberation, greater pains; I must be sure I knew what I meant to do before I drew a line or made a mark upon my paper. ’’

I wish some of our Boston critics, who have condemned his drawing as careless, sketchy, loose, and slovenly, could have heard some of his lectures, as I might call them, to me. They might have learned that there is a thoroughness of drawing of which they seem to have no comprehension; in which something more is required than a neat outline and delicate shading; which concerns itself more about the vital and essential qualities of things than with multiplicity of detail; which regards the whole as greater than the parts, the man as more important than his clothing, the woman as of more value than the jewel on her breast.

Of all faults in drawing, carelessness seemed most to excite Millet’s ire, which he would usually vent in good-natured sarcasms. His constant caution to me was, “ You must thoroughly feel (bien sentir) what you are going to draw; ” and it has always seemed to me that his own skill consisted not so much in technical manipulation as in his power of concentrating his attention upon his subject, the thorough grasp he was able to take of it, as though he had it in his very hands. Analogous to this power was that of determining once for all where the chief interest of the whole picture should lie, and of resolutely making all other parts subordinate. This more, perhaps, than anything else explains the artistic charm of his pictures for those who really have any liking for them. Each one is a homogeneous whole.

I have often regretted that I did not at the time make memoranda of all the talks on art with which Millet favored me. Only once did I attempt it, writing down immediately the following notes of a conversation upon color.

Saturday, April 5, 1856.

“ Treatises upon color, harmony of color, may be interesting and even useful if written by one who knows his subject, par un des forts, but if by one having no practical knowledge, worse than useless. Harmony of color, like harmony in music, is a matter of instinct or natural talent. Discords in color will be at once detected by the eye as discords in music by the ear, if there be a natural aptitude in either case. No theory will enable a man who has no eye for harmony of color to dispose colors harmoniously, any more than any theory of music will enable one who has not a musical ear to distinguish between concords and discords in music. La fin du jour, c’est l’épreuve d’un tableau. Harmony of color consists more in a just balance of light and dark than in juxtaposition of certain colors. There must be équilibre. The tableau must be bien assis. Pondération enfin. The great colorists très simples. Titian. Giorgione.”

Les forts, the strong men, was Millet’s favorite term for the great masters, the real artists, whether ancient or modern. By the maxim that Millet, was fond of repeating, La fin du jour c’est l’épreuve d’un tableau, he meant to say that the twilight hour, when there is not light enough to distinguish details, is the most favorable time to judge of the effect of a picture as a whole; “to see,” as William Hunt would say, ܜ the sort of spot it is going to make on the wall;ܝ whether, in short, it is a picture or a mere piece of painting. Pondération was the word by which Millet summed up all the requisite qualities. If a picture, seen in the dim light of the closing day, have this balance or equipoise, as the term Millet used may be translated, it is a picture, though it may be but a mere sketch; if it have it not, no artful juxtaposition of pure colors, no elaboration of careful finish, can make a picture of it.

Though the above was the only one of Millet’s conversations which I, of set purpose, noted down, I find several of them reported in letters written to friends at home. Here are some extracts: —

“ Millet thinks photography a good thing, and would himself like to have a machine and take views, etc. He would, however, never paint from them, but would use them only as renseignements. Photographs, he says, are like casts from nature, which never can be as good as a good statue. No mechanism can be a substitute for genius. But photography, used as we use casts, may be of the greatest service.”

“ Once, apropos of a photographic likeness we had been looking at, he said that the art would never reach perfection till the process could be performed instantaneously and without the knowledge of the sitter. Only in that way, if at all, could a natural and life - like portrait be obtained. He had himself, he said, once painted portraits, at Havre; his subjects were chiefly sea-captains, who always insisted upon being painted with a spy-glass under one arm. ‘ Oh, ils tenaient absolument à leur longuevue! ’ The business, he added, was very distasteful to him.”

“ Where there is progress, Millet says, there is hope. Besides, anybody can learn to draw, just as anybody can learn to write; it is only genius that is wanting to enable any one to be a painter. Drawing is to the art of painting what chirography is to poetry. . . . He assures me that the old proverb, ‘ Make haste slowly,’ holds good in painting as in other things; and that, paradoxical as it may seem, those who have been most celebrated as rapid painters have always been very slow workers. He instanced particularly Horace Vernet, whose rapidity of execution has passed into a proverb, and yet, as he had been told by one of Vernet’s pupils, any one to see him at work would suppose him the slowest of mortals. He drew his figure with charcoal upon the canvas in the most painstaking manner; every touch was made slowly and deliberately; but as he took time to think, or, in other words, looked before he leaped, he was as sure as he was slow, and lost but little time in effacing. . . . Millet says of himself that though he knows the human figure by heart, so as to be able to draw it perfectly without a model, he is still obliged to proceed very slowly and cautiously. . . . The great thing is to bring your mind to your work. Rembrandt is reported to have said, ‘ When I stop thinking I stop working.’ ”

“ Nothing is more dangerous for a painter than what is commonly understood by facility; that is, a happy or unhappy knack of hitting off a tolerable likeness of the thing to be represented; missing for the most part its true character and sentiment, and producing something that has about the same resemblance to a drawing that a caricature has to a portrait.” . . .

“ The most important part of color, what is called tone, can be expressed perfectly in black and white, and can best be studied so.” . . .

“ One of the most essential parts of the education of an artist is the training of the memory. Here the analogy with the art of writing holds good. In order to learn to write, the child must not only learn to imitate the form of the letter a, as he sees it in his copy-book; he must remember that form so as to be able to make it without a copy. To illustrate the necessity of cultivating this faculty, Millet related that when he was a student in the atelier of Paul Delaroche, that master was in the habit of repeating constantly to his pupils, ' Ne dessinez jamais que devant le modèle.' One day, however, M. Delaroche, who was then engaged upon his great picture for the Hémicycle des Beaux Arts, came into the atelier and addressed his pupils as follows: ‘ Gentlemen, I have all my life made a great mistake; I have always said to you, “ Never draw but from the model.” I now say to you exactly the contrary; and I advise each of you, on returning home, to draw over again from memory what you have drawn here today with the model before you. It is not enough to be able to draw what we see; we must also be able to draw what we do not see, what we never have seen; we must be able to invent. In the picture upon which I am now engaged I have to introduce the figure of Phidias. We have no portrait of that artist, and I can find no model who comes up to my idea of how Phidias should look. I have, therefore, been obliged to invent a Phidias of my own. Never having drawn except with the model before me, I have been very much embarrassed; already advanced in life, I am obliged to faire route neuve.’

“ Millet says of himself that, not having naturally a strong memory, he has by practice so educated it that with regard to matters pertaining to his profession, at least, he has no difficulty in remembering anything he may desire to retain, and he thinks that any one may in time do the same. But in order to remember, we must first understand, unless we are content to be mere parrots; and in order to remember what we see, we must first learn to see understandingly. In order to see, it is not sufficient to open the eyes; there must be an act of the mind.”

“ One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression, and the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy, of the place, though all the details may be inexact.”

“ Apropos of a sketch I had made of a corner of my room, Millet remarked upon the individuality that every object in nature possesses, even the most insignificant, and discoursed for some time upon the grand character of the pencils and other implements lying on my table ; even my stove and a pile of books on the window - seat had for him ‘ un grand caractère;’ and as Millet is not one of those who despise the ancients, he, as he does constantly, cited one of them in support of his views, instancing the portrait of the mathematician (Nicholas Kratzer, astronomer to Henry VIII. of England) by Holbein, in the Louvre, in which the mathematical instruments, he said, ‘ jouent un grand rôle,’ and have a character of grandeur and solemnity parfaitement étonnant.’ ”

In my visits to Millet’s atelier I had an opportunity of seeing a number of his pictures in various stages of progress, though I very seldom saw him actually at work upon them. From several hints he let drop, I got the impression that though he accorded me the privilege of coming when I pleased to his studio, he did not care to have any one looking on while he was actually painting, and accordingly I was careful not to intrude too often during his working hours.

Among those which earliest attracted my attention was a canvas about two and a half feet in length, — rather a large size for Millet, most of whose pictures at that time were comparatively small,— upon which was begun a picture of two men digging in a field. There was as yet no color upon the canvas, but the whole subject was drawn on the white surface with black writing-ink in strong, heavy lines, and the effect was somewhat like that of a large etching. I never saw the picture finished. Soon after my arrival it seemed to have permanently taken its place, with other unfinished works, on a shelf, with its face to the wall. Before I left, however, I saw it once more: it was then thinly scumbled over with color, faintly foreshadowing the general tone of the picture, through which the inked outlines could be distinctly seen.

Millet was by no means exempt from what seems to the non-artist public the inconceivable weakness of having more irons in the fire than one can well attend to, and then leaving them all to heat a fresh one. He began every year many more pictures than he finished. Among the works laid aside for the time there was none that attracted me more or that I longed more to see completed than one, already well advanced, representing a woman who had just been drawing water from a well. The figure was nearly half the size of life, and stood facing the spectator as if about to move toward him; the attitude was erect, the eyes looked straight forward, and each hand firmly grasped the handle of a full waterpail, the weight of which stretched rigidly downward the arm that supported it. The well behind, with its mossy stones, and its bucket suspended from a pulley overhead, was half concealed by a luxuriantly growing vine, forming an arbor of richest verdure. This part of the picture seemed fully completed: so also the woman’s head and one arm, while the rest of the figure was so far finished as to give a very satisfactory idea of what was intended. The woman’s face, though not strictly beautiful, certainly not pretty, was yet truly handsome, ruddy with the glow of health, and had withal a grand, serious character, which was fully carried out in her form and attitude. She was, in spite of her peasant’s dress, a superb, Juno-like creature. The arm that was finished was a marvel of modeling and of beauty; bare nearly to the shoulder, round and firm under the tension caused by the weight it was to support. The picture was remarkably fine in color, especially noticeable for the skill with which the woman’s blue dress was harmonized with the green background, and was as far as possible removed from the dull terra - cotta tints Millet was at the time supposed to prefer. I was impatient to have this woman with the water-pails finished and exhibited, were it only to prove that Millet was a colorist as well as a draughtsman, and that he did not always make his women ugly. In the Gazette des Beaux Arts for May, 1875, I was glad to find mention made of a picture, Femme portant deux Seaux, which I presume to be the same.

During the winter I was with him, Millet made frequent visits to Paris to learn the art of etching. The process of painting, he said, was so slow that he should never live long enough to paint all the pictures he had already in his mind. He had therefore resolved to try his hand at some more expeditious process by which to express a part of what he had to tell. On a table in his atelier I used to see the implements of this new method, — sheets of copper covered with black varnish, etching-needles, bottles of acid, — and during my stay he completed and had printed four or five plates. One of these was a reproduction of the picture of two men digging, already mentioned: another, of which he presented me with a copy, represented a woman churning. Fourteen years afterward he painted identically the same subject, which I saw in the salon of 1870, under the title of La Baratteuse.

He was not, however, perfectly satisfied with the result of these experiments; and soon, I think, abandoned etching to return to drawings in crayon and pastel, whenever he wished to express himself more rapidly than he could do in oil. Some of his earliest exhibited works were in pastel, but I remember seeing in his atelier only one drawing executed in that material, and that, for want of a glass to protect it, had become almost wholly effaced.

One morning, when Millet had gone to Paris for a few days to get fresh light on some difficulties he had met with in his etching, and especially, as he said, to learn the important process of “ biting,”— for which, he playfully added, he was not particularly well qualified by nature, — I was sitting in his atelier with his brother Pierre, when there came a loud knock at the door. On the customary invitation being given, there entered a party of four or five gentlemen, one of whom, by his wooden leg and his resemblance to his portraits, I at once recognized as the painter Diaz. It was Sunday, and they had come down from Paris for a holiday. They were much disappointed at finding that “ l’ami Millet” was absent, but, turning to Pierre, called upon him to show them some of his brother’s pictures; adding that this would be an excellent opportunity to see everything, for if Millet himself were there he would be sure to put them off, as usual, with two or three pictures, under the pretext that there were no others worth seeing. It was in vain that Pierre protested; they would take the responsibility, they said, and, besides, everything should be properly replaced, and Millet need never know. Then, with much noise and laughter and cries of admiration, they seized and placed one by one on an easel, in the best light, every canvas they could lay their hands on.

At last was brought out from its hiding-place a picture representing the interior of a peasant’s cottage. A young mother was seated, knitting or sewing, while with one foot she rocked the cradle in which lay a child asleep. To screen the infant from the light which streamed in from an open window behind it, a blanket had been folded around the head of the cradle, through which the light came tempered and diffused as by a ground-glass shade. The strongly illuminated and semi-transparent blanket formed a sort of nimbus around the child’s head; his little figure, from which, in his sleep, he had tossed most of its covering, lay in shadow, but a shadow lit up by tenderly transmitted or softly reflected lights. Anything more exquisitely beautiful than this sleeping child has rarely, I believe, been painted. Through the open window the eye looked out into a garden where a man with his back turned appeared to be at work. The whole scene gave the impression of a hot summer’s day; you could almost see the trembling motion of the heated air outside, you could almost smell the languid scent of flowers, you could almost hear the droning of the bees, and you could positively feel the absolute quiet and repose, the solemn silence, that pervaded the picture. All those at least felt it who saw the picture upon that Sunday morning. A sudden hush fell upon all the noisy and merry party. They sat or stood before the easel without speaking, almost without breathing. The silence that was in some way painted into the canvas seemed to distill from it into the surrounding air. At last Diaz said in a low voice, husky with emotion, “ Eh bien! ça, c’est biblique.” The others gave their assent by signs or in whispers, — not another word was spoken.

I do not know what Millet called this picture. He usually gave very simple titles to his works, leaving it for those who might appreciate them to find out a deeper meaning than the name implied. One of his friends christened it Le Bonheur Domestique, and Millet did not disapprove. It is not impossible that, in painting it, Millet was thinking of that holy child who long ago, in Judea, was born of a peasant mother and slept in a peasant’s cradle. The extraordinary effects of light, though explained by perfectly natural causes, give some color to the supposition, and the picture may have been intended to have a biblical character in a more literal sense than occurred to me, and perhaps to the others, at the time. The picture was, however, chiefly suggestive to me of that “ Sabbath stillness ” so dear to the descendants of the Puritans; and I could not avoid connecting it in my mind with a conversation I had lately had with Millet. He had been speaking of Milton and his accurate and beautiful descriptions of natural objects; he had been especially impressed with a passage of the Paradise Lost, in which, he said, the poet represents silence as listening. He had forgotten the connection, and remembered only the words, “ le silence écoute.” “ What a silence must that be,” he added, “ a silence that hushes itself to listen! a silence more silent than silence itself! ” I felt sure that Millet had had the image in his mind when he was painting that picture. On looking for the passage afterward, on my return to America, I was surprised that I could not find it. At last it occurred to me that Millet had of course read it in a translation; and in the French version of Paradise Lost by J. Delille, I finally discovered it. It occurs in the wellknown description of the approach of night, in the Fourth Book, beginning,—

“ Now came still evening on, and twilight gray Had in her sober livery all things clad,”etc.

In the verses describing the song of the nightingale there is in the French translation this line: —

The act of listening is not mentioned in the original, though implied in the words, “ Silence was pleased.”

Millet was not in the habit of repeating his pictures, though in his later years he repainted many of his early subjects on a larger scale and in the endeavor to develop more fully his original conception, often making important changes. The only instance, as I have learned from his brother Pierre, in which he ever painted two pictures absolutely alike, was that of a repetition he made for me during my residence at Barbison. I had been much pleased with a small canvas upon which I had occasionally found him working — a peasant girl, wearing the distinctive white cloak peculiar to Barbison, reclining against a rock overshadowed by trees, and engaged in knitting, while a flock of sheep under her charge was feeding around her. In the distance was a glimpse of the Plain and men at work in the fields. The picture attracted me by its fresh, cool tone, suggestive of spring, the very season in which we then were, while the landscape embraced several of the landmarks with which I had become familiar in my daily walks. I expressed to Millet my desire to take a work of his home with me, and suggested that a subject similar to this would be what I should most like. The picture, he said, was already disposed of; but, since I liked it so much, he would willingly repeat it for me. I was for a moment disturbed at this proposal; I should have preferred a new subject, of which I should be the sole possessor; but reflecting that, even in that case, I should have no power to prevent Millet’s making a repetition of it for some one else, and that an entirely new picture might not please me so well as this, with which I was thoroughly satisfied, I agreed to the proposition.

Millet immediately set to work, and in a few days the repetition, identical in size, was nearly as far advanced as the original. He now worked upon the two pictures alternately, carrying first one and then the other a little in advance of its competitor, and in this way making both, as he himself thought, better than either would have been without this rivalry, as it were, between them.

In a fortnight’s time both had reached a stage where Millet said it would be desirable to have a frame. He attached much importance to this. A picture, he said, ought always to be finished in its frame. One could never know beforehand what effect the gold border would have; the picture might have to be painted up to it, and a picture should always be in harmony with its frame as well as with itself. He did, in this case, lighten the whole sky, besides making other changes, after the frame arrived.

About two months after I had first spoken to him on the subject, both pictures were signed and pronounced finished. It was very difficult to distinguish them apart, and still harder to say which was the better of the two. In several instances a touch, that might at first look like an accident, a slip of the brush, would be found to be identically the same in both, showing it to be the result, not of carelessness, but of deliberate intention. Millet gave me my choice of the two pictures, but would afford me no assistance in making the selection. One, he thought, “ was just as good as the other.” I was long in coming to a decision, but finally my choice fell, without my being aware of it at the time, upon the one that had been first begun.

It has sometimes been claimed that Millet was consciously guided in his choice of subjects by philanthropic, reformatory, or even political motives. Under the republic of 1848, he was hailed by some and decried by others as the advocate, through his paintings, of the principles professed by the democratic and socialistic party. And later, it has been the fashion among some of his friends to speak of him as the painter of suffering humanity, and to regard him as the poor man’s advocate in the great cause, ever on trial, of the poor against the rich.

In all his conversations with me he never, so far as I remember, touched upon political questions; nor do I think he ever proposed to himself, of set purpose, the task of benefiting the laboring classes; least of all by means of any arbitrary change in their outward condition. In exhibiting the poverty-stricken and toil-worn peasant with a truthfulness and a pathetic power never surpassed, he intended no protest against the unequal distribution of this world’s goods, no accusation against those seemingly more favored by fortune. He had no envy of the rich and powerful; his feeling toward them was rather one of compassion. In one of my visits to Paris I had seen some of the ceremonies which took place at the baptism of the Prince Imperial. As I described to him the pomp and splendor of the scene, Millet’s only comment was, “ Pauvre petit Prince! ”

Millet was first of all an artist, a poet who wrote with colors upon canvas instead of with ink upon paper. He painted peasants and their occupations because these were what he knew thoroughly; and he held that a man should write about or paint only those subjects of which he had thorough practical knowledge. A peasant and the son of a peasant, he could paint the peasant life from the peasant’s point of view; not indeed that of the ordinary peasant, but that of a peasant who happened to be both poet and painter. Like all who have sung “ the short and simple annals of the poor,” he was strongly attracted to the pathetic side of their story; not merely because he saw that it was the more effective for the purposes of art, but because it touched him as a man. His pictures are not all sad, though all are serious, thoughtful, austere.

So far as regards the people of Barbison, from whom he so often took suggestions for his pictures, he repeatedly told me that he did not consider them at all “ malheureux.” Barbison was, in fact, a prosperous place; there was no real poverty there.

He was not an undiscriminating panegyrist of the poor and ignorant. He did not believe there was no virtue possible except to those who earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. It is true that with a noble consistency and true self-respect, he preferred to live, as he had been born and bred, in outward appearance a peasant. There was no affectation in this; he wore his blouse and his sabots when at home and about his work, because he was used to them and found them comfortable; but when occasion called him to Paris, he laid aside his rustic dress. But it was not among the peasants, his neighbors, that he found his friends and associates. These came to him from the world outside. They were people of taste and culture, artists and men of letters.

The peasant was, to Millet, no ideal being clothed in imaginary virtues. He knew him as he was and so painted him, though he avoided his more ignoble aspects as unworthy the dignity of art and because they were repulsive to him as a man. More than once he spoke to me of the utter want of appreciation of the charms of nature shown by the peasant population of Barbison, of their often discontented and repining spirit, their low aims, their sordid views, their petty jealousies. But at the same time he knew that there might be, that there, was, a peasant life free from these degrading faults. Such a life he had known in his own peasant home in Normandy, and in the traditions and memories of that early home he found the ideal of the peasant life he has drawn in his pictures — an ideal which was in fact a reality.

His peasants, it will be observed by those who examine attentively the long series of his works, are always of the orderly and industrious class, never the vauriens, the ne’er-do-weels. They may be poor, but they do not therefore complain; there is in them no trace of repining or discontent. They do not consider themselves objects of charity, nor are they conscious of exciting our pity. They are not beggars, and never wear the beggar’s livery; their garments may be patched, testifying to the thrifty care of wife or mother, but they are never ragged. There is no levity, no wantonness in Millet’s pictures; nothing low or mean. Seriousness, earnestness, freedom from passion and excitement, order, sobriety, industry, contentment with one’s lot, a modest self-respect, the love of parents and children, of husband and wife, good-will toward man and piety toward God, —these are the virtues Millet saw practiced in the home of his childhood, and which he has celebrated in the songs, or rather the hymns, he has written upon canvas. The family, — a subject he has so often painted, was above all others his favorite theme, an echo of which runs like an undertone through all his works. There seems to be always a suggestion of the wife and child at home, even when we see only the man at work alone in the field; while the husband and father, an invisible presence, haunts the room where the mother watches her sleeping child.

June, 1856, was drawing to a close when I bade adieu to Millet to return to America. Fourteen years elapsed before I saw him again. Toward the end of June, 1870, almost on the anniversary of my departure, I trod once more the familiar street and knocked at the door of Millet’s atelier. I had with me a companion to whom I wished to give a glimpse of the famous village and the famous painter. Millet himself answered our knock, and we found him alone in his atelier, which had much the same look as in the old days, except that it seemed more crowded with furniture and the varied litter that naturally collects in an artist’s work-room. The number of books especially had greatly increased; heaps of them were lying about. Millet himself appeared very little changed; he was perhaps a little stouter, and his beard had a few more silver threads, but it was the same man in apparently the same dress as when I had seen him last.

On an easel stood a picture upon which he had been working when interrupted by our visit, and which was sold after his death for twenty-four thousand francs, under the title Les Tueurs de Cochons. The scene was laid in the court-yard of a house, and a large hog was the central figure. A man was trying, by means of a rope attached to the poor animal’s neck, to drag him from his stye, while a woman tempted him forth with a platter of vegetables. The purpose of their endeavors was made painfully evident by a large knife which lay ready at hand. The poor creature, with an evident presentiment of his impending fate, had planted his feet firmly on the ground, and would be neither dragged nor enticed. But, in spite of his resistance, he felt that he was only delaying, not averting, the fatal moment. Despair as well as obstinacy was plainly depicted in His whole attitude and expression. In the background a child, distracted between curiosity and dread, had climbed upon the wall, while the family cat, with arched back, as though she too scented danger, watched the proceedings half in terror, half in anger. There was a leaden sky overhead, and the whole picture had a sombre

tone in keeping with the tragic nature of the subject. My companion spoke of its deep pathos. “Madame,” replied Millet, “ c’est un drame.”

Edward Wheelwright.