In the severely restrained, grandly simple,
profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed,
strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found its artistic
expression.
For Millet is neither a revolutionary nor a sentimentalist, nor even a
romanticist; he is essentially a classicist of the classicists, a
conservative of the conservatives, the one modern exemplar of the grand
style. It is because his art is so old that it was "too new" for even
Corot to understand it; because he harked back beyond the
pseudoclassicism of his time to the great art of the past, and was
classic as Phidias and Giotto and Michelangelo were classic, that he
seemed strange to his contemporaries. In everything he was conservative.
He hated change; he wanted things to remain as they had always been. He
did not especially pity the hard lot of the peasant; he considered it
the natural and inevitable lot of man who "eats bread in the sweat of
his brow." He wanted the people he painted "to look as if they belonged
to their place--as if it would be impossible for them ever to think of
being anything else but what they are." In the herdsman and the
shepherd, the sower and the reaper, he saw the immemorial types of
humanity whose labors have endured since the world began and were
essentially what they now are when Virgil wrote his "Georgics" and when
Jacob kept the flocks of Laban.
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