II
JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET
Jean Francois Millet, who lived hard and died poor, is now perhaps the
most famous artist of the nineteenth century. His slightest work is
fought for by dealers and collectors, and his more important pictures,
if they chance to change hands, bring colossal and almost incredible
prices. And of all modern reputations his, so far as we can see, seems
most likely to be enduring. If any painter of the immediate past is
definitively numbered with the great masters, it is he. Yet the popular
admiration for his art is based on a I misapprehension almost as
profound as that of those contemporaries who decried and opposed him.
They thought him violent, rude, ill-educated, a "man of the woods," a
revolutionist, almost a communist. We are apt to think of him as a
gentle sentimentalist, a soul full of compassion for the hard lot of the
poor, a man whose art achieves greatness by sheer feeling rather than by
knowledge and intellect. In spite of his own letters, in spite of the
testimony of many who knew him well, in spite of more than one piece of
illuminating criticism, these two misconceptions endure; and, for the
many, Millet is still either the painter of "The Man with the Hoe," a
powerful but somewhat exceptional work, or the painter of "L'Angelus,"
precisely the least characteristic picture he ever produced.
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