Life of the Artist.
The story of the artist. In the little country village of Gruchy, France, dwelt a family of peasants who tilled the land and lived by the sweat of their brows. There were the grandmother, father, mother, and eight children. The eldest son was Jean François Millet, the artist who painted this picture. His mother worked out in the fields with the father, even as the women in this picture are working, so little Jean François was brought up by his grandmother, who was also his godmother. It was she who named him Jean for his father and François after the good Saint Francis. She was a deeply religious woman, and almost the only pictures Millet saw in his boyhood were those in the Bible, which he copied again and again, drawing them upon the stone walls with white chalk. This pleased the grandmother, and she encouraged him all she could.
When Millet was six years old he was sent to school. At twelve he began to study Latin with a priest in the village who was very fond of him and taught him for the pleasure of it. From this time on his studies were frequently interrupted by his work on the farm, for as eldest son he was the one the father relied upon most.
The elder Millet had a keen appreciation of the beauty in nature and often, as they worked, he would call his son’s attention to the beauties around them. He would say, “Look at that tree—how large and beautiful! It is as beautiful as a flower,” or “See, that house half buried by the field is good; it seems to me that it ought to be drawn that way.” Then sometimes he would try to model a figure from a piece of clay or cut an animal or plant from wood. So it was not much wonder that the son, too, tried to draw animals, the barn, the garden, and various objects around him.
When he was eighteen years old he drew his first great picture. As he was coming home from church he met an old man whose back was bent over a cane as he walked slowly along. Something about the bent figure appealed to Millet so strongly that he had a great desire to draw a portrait of him. So, taking some charcoal from his pocket, he drew on a stone wall a picture of the old man. People passing by recognized the old man in Millet’s picture and were much pleased.
His father, too, was delighted, for he had once wished to be an artist himself. He now resolved that his son should have a chance. A family council was held and all agreed that Millet must be sent to some good artist to study. So the father took him to an artist (Mouchel) in Cherbourg to whom he showed some of Millet’s drawings. At first the artist would not believe the boy had drawn them, but, finally convinced, he was very glad to have this talented boy for his pupil.
Millet had studied with him only two months when his father died, and he was obliged to return home to take his father’s place on the farm as best he could. But the people of the village, who were much interested in his paintings, resolved to help him. So they raised money to send him back to Cherbourg to study, and finally to the great city of Paris. There he studied under Delaroche, a fashionable painter of that day. The other students could not understand Millet, for, peasant that he was, he rarely spoke, allowing others to make all the advances and answering scarcely a word. However, if they went too far he could use his fists to such good advantage that they soon left him quite alone. He was always known among them as “the man of the woods.”
They soon found out that he could draw and paint, too, and his work received much praise. Still his pictures did not sell, and Millet’s life in Paris was a continuous struggle with poverty.
One of the reasons that his pictures did not sell was because he chose his models from the lower classes and represented them in their humble daily tasks. His critics urged him to paint, instead, some beautiful girl or fine-looking man from the village or city. To this he replied: “Beauty does not dwell in the face; it radiates forth from the whole figure and appears in the suitableness of the action to the subject. Your pretty peasants would be ill suited for picking up wood, for gleaning in the fields of August, for drawing water from a well. Beauty is expression.”
In spite of the fact that he could barely earn a living in Paris, Millet remained there many years. He was married and his children were born there. Finally he left Paris with his wife and children and settled at Barbizon, a small village in France, where he spent the rest of his life. Many descriptions have been written and many pictures painted of the modest white stone cottage in which Millet’s last years were spent.