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Updated: May 27, 2025
Women and old men were already toiling in the fields, stooping like the figures in Millet's "Gleaners," as we raced through an interminable avenue of poplars, past closed inns, past depopulated farms, past wooden windmills, perched high upon wooden platforms like gigantic dovecots. At each challenge a sombre word was exchanged about Antwerp again that strange telepathy of peril.
It is not an accident that Raphael portrayed Madonnas, serene and glorified, and Millet pictured rude peasants bent with toil. Raphael's painting is the culmination of two centuries of eager striving after the adequate expression of religious sentiment; in Millet's work the realism of his age is transfigured.
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.
There is something to our ideas rather absurd in the notion of bestowing such a tag of ribbon on a man of Millet's aims and occupations; but all honours are honours just according to the estimation of the man who receives them and the society in which he lives; and Millet no doubt prized his admission to the Legion of Honour all the more because it had been so long delayed and so little truckled for.
The idea is the emotional content of the work; the execution is the practical expressing of the idea by means of the medium and the vehicle. The idea of Millet's "Sower" is the emotion attending his conception of the laborer rendered in visual terms; the execution of the picture is exhibited in the composition, the color, the drawing, and the actual brush-work.
One evening our hero, after paying a little unwonted attention to his toilet prepared to set out for Miss Millet's cottage. He had obtained leave of absence for the evening, and had made up his mind to spend an hour or two in metaphysical discussion. Rose had not yet left her aunt but no matter. If she could not assist in the conversation, she could at all events listen, and might be benefited.
The picture of the Gleaners especially has that so-called "quality of circumambient light" which circulates about the objects, so to speak, and gives them position in space. Millet's landscapes also have a depth of spaciousness which reaches into infinite distance. The principles of composition are applied in perspective as well as laterally.
From seed time to harvest there is a constant succession of different tasks, and hardly is the harvest gathered in before it is time to prepare again for planting. Before ploughing can be begun the fields must first be cleared of stubble and weeds. Now in Millet's village of Barbizon, this clearing of the fields was done, in his day, by means of an implement called in French a houe.
If for nothing else, I should dwell on my brief Boston visit for opening to me the new world of Millet's pictures. Will America ever have such an artist out of her own gestation, body, soul? Sunday, April 17.
Millet's work must be considered later in these papers, but it is useful here to make this passing comment, that with Corot he represents what is best in our modern art; that the greatest quality of our modern art is its steadfast reliance on nature; and that, paradoxical as it may seem, they are alike in taking only that from nature which is serviceable to the clarity of their expression, being in this both at odds with the common practice of modern painting, which usually adopts a more servile attitude towards nature.
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