--Millet. "The Potato Planters."
In the Quincy A. Shaw Collection.]
If even Millet never again attained quite the august impressiveness of
this picture it is because no other action of rustic man has so wide or
so deep a meaning for us as this of sowing. All the meaning there is in
an action he could make us feel with entire certainty, and always he
proceeds by this method of elimination, concentration, simplification,
insistence on the essential and the essential only. One of the most
perfect of all his pictures--more perfect than "The Sower" on account of
qualities of mere painting, of color, and of the rendering of landscape,
of which I shall speak later--is "The Gleaners" (Pl. 3). Here one figure
is not enough to express the continuousness of the movement; the utmost
simplification will not make you feel, as powerfully as he wishes you to
feel it, the crawling progress, the bending together of back and
thighs, the groping of worn fingers in the stubble. The line must be
reinforced and reduplicated, and a second figure, almost a facsimile of
the first, is added. Even this is not enough. He adds a third figure,
not gathering the ear, but about to do so, standing, but stooped forward
and bounded by one great, almost uninterrupted curve from the peak of
the cap over her eyes to the heel which half slips out of the sabot, and
the thing is done.
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