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Sensier saw what seems to have been the first sketch for "The Sower" as early as 1847, and it existed long before that, while "The Winnower" was exhibited in 1848; and the overheard conversation is said to have taken place in 1849.
Julia Cartwright, in the preface to the above mentioned biography, mentions other magazine articles not so generally accessible. Portrait frontispiece, a life-size crayon made by Millet in 1847 and given to his friend Charlier. It afterwards became the property of Sensier.. Going to Work, one of several versions of the subject in different mediums, oil, pastel, drawing, and etching.
All this time he was following his conscience in the matter of his work, and selling almost nothing. In a letter to a friend he tells how dreadfully poor they are, although his new wife was the most devoted helpful woman imaginable, known far and near as "Mere Millet." The artist wrote to Sensier, his friend, who aided him: "I have received the hundred francs. They came just at the right time.
It is beautiful, it is great as a myster."<1> <1> Sensier, Vie et Oeuvre de J.-F. Millet. The idea is, as I said, from this point of view, a means to new beauty; and the stranger and subtler the idea, the more original the forms. The more unrestrained the expression of emotion in the figures, the more chance to surprise them in some new lovely pattern.
These and the philosophers of Port Royal, with Bossuet, and Fénelon, with the Bible and Virgil, were his mental food. Virgil and the Bible he read always in the Latin; he was so familiar with them both that, when a man, his biographer, Sensier, says he never met a more eloquent translator of these two books.
He was to be seen behind his plough, his priest's robe gathered up about his loins, his breviary in one hand, following the furrow up and down the undulating fields which ran to the cliffs. Reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. Probably commenced at Cherbourg, where Millet took refuge with his family during the Franco-Prussian War, as Sensier mentions it on Millet's return.
It is drawn without fault, and colored without crudity; and one feels the August sun which ripens the wheat." Sensier says: "The picture sold with difficulty for four hundred dollars. In his father, whose strongest characteristic was an intense love of nature, Millet found an unconscious influence in the direction which his life was to follow.
What his sensations were he partially pictured to his friend Sensier thirty years after: "It seemed as though I had at last attained, achieved. My feelings were too great for words, and I closed my eyes, lest I be dazzled by the sight and then dare not open them lest I should find it all a dream.
This was his simple life. Very slowly, recognition came that way. Theodore Rousseau, himself a great artist, and a man too great for jealousy, spread his fame, and the faithful Sensier in Paris lost no opportunity to aid his friend by the use of a commercial shrewdness in which Millet was woefully lacking.
Millet was accused of socialism; of inciting the peasants to revolt; and from his quiet retreat in the country, he defended himself in a letter to his friend Sensier as follows: "I see very clearly the aureole encircling the head of the daisy, and the sun which glows beyond, far, far over the country-side, its glory in the skies; I see, not less clearly, the smoking plough-horses in the plain, and in a rocky corner a man bent with labor, who groans as he works, or who for an instant tries to straighten himself to catch his breath.
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