Romain Rolland

“ Her death threw Millet into deep despair. He remained obstinately silent for many days. His mother was now alone, in the country, far from him; she wrote painful and plaintive entreaties that he would come and embrace her before she too passed away. Millet's heart was rent by this pressing appeal; but he was short of money and unable to take the journey. "My poor child," wrote his mother, "if you could only come before the winter! I have a great longing to see you this one little time more. I have done without everything; there is nothing left for me but to suffer and die. ”

“ People are right when they say that Millet has painted pictures of more strength and meaning than this. The Angelus nevertheless has a musical charm of its own. Millet meant the sounds of a country evening, the distant chime of bells, to be heard in it. He deeply felt and has expressed the melancholy poetry of the hour when man's struggle with the earth passes into peace, and the august grandeur of the simple lonely prayer in the vast deserted plain at twilight. ”

“ He saw in it a symbol of a father exhausting himself in silence for the life of his family. "Yes, Millet works for those who belong to him," he said, "he exhausts himself like a tree that produces too much blossom and fruit; he wears himself out to keep his children alive. ”

“ These three were: "A beautiful woman, a masterpiece of the gods, for whom two men are fighting. An old man on a rock, fishing in the sea with a net. A boy sitting by a hedge to guard a vine, but so busy weaving a straw cage for grasshoppers that he does not see two foxes, one of which makes off with his breakfast while the other eats the best grapes off the vine." The same disposition of mind shows itself in the four decorative paintings which he did for the dining-room of a hotel on the Boulevard Haussmann, and in which antique subjects are treated under the name of The Four Seasons. ”

“ I run there sometimes at the end of the day, when my day's work is over, and I come back every time crushed! The calmness and grandeur are appalling, so much so that I find myself feeling really frightened. ”

“ It is precisely that feeling of the "general aspect" of a landscape and of its living and moving "different effects" that the Barbizon masters were about to acquire in all its fulness. Of the vanguard in that glorious phalanx of French landscape painters, especially Paul Huet owed much to the example of English landscape painters and of Constable and Bonnington in particular; the masters were soon out-stripped by the pupils, and the painting of French landscapes attained a greatness unknown since Poussin and Claude Lorraine. ”

“ In 1862 Millet painted, and in 1863 exhibited at the Salon, Winter and the Crows, Potato Planters, Sheep grazing, Woman carding Flax, The Stag, and the Man with the Hoe. In painting the last of these pictures he foresaw pretty clearly towards what a battle he was marching. It was a sort of challenge flung at Parisian taste. Labour was presented in its sternest and most painful shape, as a torture, racking man's limbs and killing his mind, dragging him down almost to the level of the beast. ”

“ Sensier had to get up a raffle to send him one hundred francs. In 1857, Millet was so unhappy that the idea of suicide beset him; and in order to drive away these morbid thoughts, which his religious soul severely condemned, he made a sketch in black chalk representing a painter dead at the foot of his easel, and a woman crying out in terror: "Suicide marks a dishonourable man!" ”

“ Shrieks of indignation were raised against them by the critics. Millet's former defenders, Paul de St Victor among them, turned against him. "These are scare-crows set up in a field," he wrote. "M. Millet seems to think that poor execution suits pictures of poverty; his ugliness has no accentuation, his vulgarity no relief." People refused to see in the picture anything but a political work, an indictment against the poverty of the masses. ”

“ The sceptical "society" public could not understand the importance which Millet's peasants attach to the smallest acts of life. They are wholly absorbed in what they are doing; they believe in it absolutely. This did not harmonise with the dilettantism of Paris, nor with truth as it appears on the stage. Theodore Rousseau had the courage to write a severe letter to Théophile Gautier: "You have been exploring art since 1830," he said. "Sailing as on an ocean, you have doubled many capes, passed through many breakers; yours has been the genius that always sees the right rallying point ”

“ The two have often been bracketed together: "Certain wild animals may be seen scattered over the country, males and females, black, livid, and burnt up by the sun, bound to the earth, in which they poke and fumble with invincible obstinacy: they have a kind of articulate speech, and when they rise upon their feet they show a human countenance, and indeed are men." [10]
"The Man with the Hoe will cause me to be abused by many people who do not like to have their minds filled with things that do not belong to their own circle nor to be disturbed," wrote Millet. ”

“ In 1868 Millet made a second stay at Vichy, and travelled into Alsace and Switzerland, visiting Bâle, Lucerne, Berne and Zurich. He does not seem to have felt the beauty of the Alps so keenly as Rousseau, who found in them his earliest and his latest inspirations. To the Salon of 1869 he sent, besides The Knitting Lesson and the Woman at a Spinning Wheel, the Pig-Killers, which excited hardly less sarcasm than the Peasants carrying a Calf, or the Man with the Hoe. It is a work of savage realism. ”

“ In 1849 Millet went to Barbizon. Theodore Rousseau had been there as early as 1833, and had pretty well settled there about 1837 at the same time as Aligny and Diaz.
For some twenty years or more before this time, French painters had felt the need of diving deep into nature and living in intimate communion with her. As late as 1824 Constable could still write: "The French landscape painters study much but only pictures; and they know no more of nature than cab-horses do of meadows. ”

“ None the less do I see the horses in the plain, smoking as they plough; and then, in some rocky spot, a man completely errené, whose panting gasps have sounded since morning, and who tries to stand upright a little to get breath. ”

“ The worst of it is that they generally paint detached objects such as leaves, rocks and stones, so that they only see isolated bits detached from the whole, and neglect the general aspect of nature as well as its different effects. ”

“ It was Rousseau, too, who bought the Peasant grafting a Tree. With the proceeds of the Woman feeding Chickens, for which the amateur Letrône paid 2000 francs, a sum that seemed to him fabulous, Millet was able to take a little journey and spend four months with his children in his native district at La Hague (June 1854) . He painted with pious precision everything that had belonged to his family, the homestead, the garden, the cider-press and the stables; he made fourteen paintings, twenty drawings, and filled two sketch-books. ”

“ In 1866 Millet, who had been back to Normandy on account of his sister Emilie's death, exhibited a Landscape: Gréville, which had no success. His wife, who was ill, was sent to Vichy and he went with her. The Bourbonnais country interested him greatly. He plunged afresh into a rustic life simpler than that of Barbizon, where the influence exerted by the neighbourhood of Paris was growing year by year more perceptible. "The country is bright," he wrote to Sensier, "and has some likeness to many parts of Normandy. The country people are far more really peasants than those of Barbizon ”

“ At the same period Millet painted Peasants going to work in the fields; a Woman beating Hemp; Wood Gatherers in the forest; a Virgin for the signboard of a fancy shop at the corner of the Rue de Notre Dame de Lorette and the Rue St Lazare; Young women sewing, a Man spreading Manure, and The Four Seasons. ”

“ It was declared that Millet slandered the peasant and could not see the beauty of the country. He replied in a letter of magnificent religious grandeur. "The things said of my Man with the Hoe seem to me very strange. Is it impossible, then, to receive quite simply the ideas that occur to the mind on seeing a man doomed to earn his living in the sweat of his brow? Some people say that I deny the charms of the country. ”