Subjects for Short Compositions
What I See in This Picture.
How Butter Is Made.
The Cat and the Hen.
What I Like about This Picture.
The Man Who Painted This Picture.
The story of the artist. It was not a very long walk to the little village schoolhouse at Gruchy where Jean François Millet studied. His good old grandmother had taught him his letters at home, and he could read and spell very well before he ever went to school at all. He was past six years old, and large for his age, before he started. When he arrived at the school yard the first thing he did was to fight. There was a boy in the school who had fought every boy in the class, and proved that he was the strongest. So when he saw Millet coming down the street with the older children in whose care he had been sent, this boy hurried toward him and dared him to fight. Millet himself tells how he came out victorious, and how proud the older children were. “Millet is only six and a half,” they said, “and he has beaten a boy more than seven years old.”
But Millet was not a fighter, and fought only when he was forced to. He loved to study, and soon stood at the head of his class. When the village priest offered to teach him Latin he was only too glad to study evenings or at any other time. At home he found little to read except the Bible, which belonged to his grandmother; even when he was very little she had told him many wonderful stories from this book. This Bible contained many pictures, and one day he surprised her by making a drawing from one of them. He drew his picture on the wall of the house, with white chalk. She was delighted, and so were his mother and father when they saw the picture. After that he drew many pictures of things in and about the house, and of his grandmother, his brothers and sisters, and his parents.
As a boy Millet had to work in the fields with his father and he had little time to spend on his drawings or his studies. In France it is the custom among the peasants to spend an hour every day in rest. But Millet, instead of sleeping during that hour, spent it in drawing the homely scenes around him.
It was not until he was eighteen years old, however, that he drew a picture which made his parents decide he should become an artist. This picture was of an old man bent over a cane, whom Millet met as he was coming home from church. He drew this with charcoal on a stone wall, and people recognized it at once and were very much pleased. His father said he would take him to see an artist in the next village to whom he would show some of Millet’s drawings and find out whether he thought the boy could become an artist. Millet took two drawings with him. The first represented two shepherds with their sheep, one shepherd playing a flute, the other listening as he watched the sheep nibbling the grass near by. The second drawing was of a man giving bread to a beggar at his door. When the artist (Mouchel) saw these drawings he was amazed, and at first would not believe Millet had drawn them himself. He said that Millet would surely be a great painter. This decided the matter, and Millet became Mouchel’s pupil.