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Updated: June 10, 2025
He advised that it would be foolish to go back to Gruchy at once. The youth should go to some master and show what he could do remain and study for a little while at least; in fact, he himself would take him to Delaroche. Things looked brighter; and arrangements were made to meet on the morrow and go interview the master. Delaroche was found and proved kindly.
Many years after his life in the Gruchy home, Millet painted the portrait of the grandmother whom he had loved so much that he cried out: "I wish to paint her soul!" No one could desire a better reward than such a tribute. Millet had an uncle who was a priest and he did what he could to give the boy a start in learning.
As time went on, he progressed to making little drawings on his own account; and we may be sure the priest and all the good wives of Gruchy had quite settled in their own minds before long that Jean Francois Millet's hands would be able in time to paint quite a beautiful altar- piece for the village church.
Jean François Millet was born October 4, 1814, in the hamlet of Gruchy, a mere handful of houses which lie in a valley descending to the sea, in the department of the Manche, not far from Cherbourg. He was the descendant of a class which has no counterpart in England or America, and which in his native France has all but disappeared.
In Gruchy Millet was born; in Greville he first came into contact with incentive I photographed both places and spent a night and a day with M. Polidor, the old inn-keeper who was the painter's friend. Surely, never was so large a statue erected in so small a village. The peasant artist sits there on a bank of mosses, looking over at the old church that squats on the hillside.
This unexercised talent Francois inherited in a still greater degree. As time went on, he progressed to making little drawings on his own account; and we may be sure the priest and all the good wives of Gruchy had quite settled in their own minds before long that Jean Francois Millet's hands would be able in time to paint quite a beautiful altar-piece for the village church.
In the village of Gruchy, near Greville, in this wild and beautiful region of the Cotentin, there lived at the beginning of the present century a sturdy peasant family of the name of Millet. The father of the family was one of the petty village landholders so common in France; a labourer who owned and tilled his own tiny patch of farm, with the aid of his wife and children.
And now this first-born of the peasant flock was going to leave his native village of Gruchy. He was clad in a new suit of clothes, spun, woven, cut and sewed by the hands of his grandmother. He was going away, and his belongings were all packed in a sailor's canvas bag; but he was not going to sea. Great had been the preparations for this journey.
A time of peculiar pinching hardship came, and Jean Francois again bade Paris adieu and made his way back to Gruchy. There he could work in the fields, gather varech on the seashore, and possibly paint portraits now and then just for amusement. And thus he would live out the measure of his days. The visit of Jean Francois to his boyhood's home proved a repetition of the first.
Soon the truth forced itself on Jean Francois and Catherine that no man is thought much of by his kinsmen and boyhood acquaintances. No one at Gruchy believed in the genius of Jean Francois no one but the old grandmother, who daily hobbled to mass and prayed the Blessed Virgin not to forget her boy.
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