"Things are where they are for a purpose," and if the surface
of a picture is rough in any place it is because just that degree of
roughness was necessary to attain the desired effect. He could make mere
paint express light as few artists have been able to do--"The
Shepherdess" is flooded with it--and he could do this without any
sacrifice of the sense of substance in the things on which the light
falls. If some of his canvases are brown it is because brown seemed to
him the appropriate note to express what he had to say; "The Gleaners"
glows with almost the richness of a Giorgione, and other pictures are
honey-toned or cool and silvery or splendidly brilliant. And in whatever
key he painted, the harmony of his tones and colors is as large, as
simple, and as perfect as the harmony of his lines and masses.
[Illustration: Plate 9.--Millet. "The Shepherdess."
In the Chauchard collection, Louvre.]
But if we cannot admit that Millet's drawings are better than his
paintings, we may be very glad he did them. His great epic of the soil
must have lacked many episodes, perhaps whole books and cantos, if it
had been written only in the slower and more elaborate method. The
comparative slightness and rapidity of execution of his drawings and
pastels enabled him to register many inventions and observations that we
must otherwise have missed, and many of these are of the highest value.
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