In the epic grandeur of such pictures as these there is something akin
to sadness, though assuredly Millet did not mean them to be sad. Did he
not say of the "Woman Carrying Water": "I have avoided, as I always do,
with a sort of horror, everything that might verge on the sentimental"?
He wished her to seem "to do her work simply and cheerfully ... as a
part of her daily task and the habit of her life." And he was not always
in the austere and epical mood. He could be idyllic as well, and if he
could not see "the joyous side" of life or nature he could feel and make
us feel the charm of tranquillity. Indeed, this remark of his about the
joyous side of things was made in the dark, early days when life was
hardest for him. He broadened in his view as he grew older and
conditions became more tolerable, and he has painted a whole series of
little pictures of family life and of childhood that, in their smiling
seriousness, are endlessly delightful. The same science, the same
thoughtfulness, the same concentration and intellectual grasp that
defined for us the superb gesture of "The Sower" have gone to the
depiction of the adorable uncertainty, between walking and falling, of
those "First Steps" (Pl. 8) from the mother's lap to the outstretched
arms of the father; and the result, in this case as in the other, is a
thing perfectly and permanently expressed.
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