Troyon’s only pupil was Émile van Marcke, half a Belgian, who met the elder master in Sèvres, and for a long time worked by his side at Fontainebleau. He united the occupation of a painter with that of a landed proprietor. The cattle which he bred on an extensive scale at his property, Bouttencourt in Normandy, had a celebrity amongst French landowners, as he had the reputation of rearing the best fat cattle. He too had not the impressiveness of Troyon, though he was, none the less, a healthy and forcible master. His animals have no passions, no movement, and no battles. They seem lost in endless contemplation, gravely and sedately chewing the cud. Around them stretch the soft green Norman pastures, and above them arches the wide sky, which at the horizon imperceptibly melts into the sea.

Jadin is a painter of horses and dogs who had once a great reputation, though to-day his name is almost, if not entirely forgotten. He was fond of painting hunting scenes, and is not wanting in life and movement; but he is too impersonal to play a part in the history of painting. Having named him, some mention must likewise be made of Eugène Lambert, the painter of cats, and Palizzi, who painted goats. Lambert, who was fond of introducing his little heroes as the actors of comical scenes, is by admission the chief amongst all those who were honoured amongst the different nations with the title of “Raphaels of the Cat.” Palizzi, an incisive master of almost brutal energy, a true son of the wild Abruzzo hills, delighted, like his compatriots Morelli and Michetti, in the blazing light of noon, shining over rocky heights, and throwing a dazzle of gold on the dark green copse. Lançon, a rather arid painter, though a draughtsman with a broad and masculine stroke, was the greatest descendant of Delacroix in the representation of tigers, lions, bears, and hippopotamuses. An unobtrusive artist, though one of very genial talent, was Charles Jacque, the Troyon of sheep. He has been compared with the rageur of Bas Bréau, the proud oak which stands alone in a clearing. A man of forcible character, over whom age had no power, he survived until 1894 as the last representative of the noble school of Barbizon. He has painted sheep in flocks or separately, in the pasture, on the verge of the field-path, or in the fold; and he loved most of all to paint them in the misty hours of evening twilight, at peace and amid peaceful nature. But in spirited etchings he has likewise represented old weather-beaten walls, the bright films of spring, the large outlines of peasant folk, the tender down of young chickens, the light play of the wind upon the sea, murmuring brooks, and quiet haunts of the wood. Like Millet, he had in an eminent degree the gift of simplification, the greatest quality that an artist can have. With three or four strokes he could plant a figure on its feet, give life to an animal, or construct a landscape. He was the most intimate friend of Jean François Millet, and painted part of what Millet painted also.

CHAPTER XXVI

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

Whence has Millet come?

It was the time when art, still blind to the life around, could find no subjects worthy of it except in the past and in the distance. Then Millet came and overthrew an art vegetating in museums or astray in tropical countries. It was the time when Leopold Robert in Italy tested the noble pose of the school of David upon the peasant, and when the German painters of rustics recognised in the labourer an object for pleasantries and pathetic little scenes. Then Millet stepped forward and painted, with profound simplicity, the people at work in the field, or in their distress, without sentimentality and without beautifying or idealising them. That great utterance, “I work,” the utterance of the nineteenth century, is here spoken aloud for the first time. Rousseau and his fellow-artists were the painters of the country. Millet became the painter of the labourer. He, the great peasant, is the creator of that painting of peasants which is entwined with the deepest roots of intimate landscape. Misunderstood in the beginning, it proclaimed for the first time the new gospel of art before which the people of all nations bow at the present date. What others did later was merely to advance on the path opened by Millet. And as time passes the figure of this powerful man shines more and more brilliantly. The form of Jean François Millet rises so powerfully, so imperiously, and so suddenly that one might almost imagine him to have come from Ibsen’s third kingdom; for he is without forerunners in art. An attempt has been made to bring him into relation with the social and political movement of ideas in the forties, but certainly this is unjust. Millet was in no sense revolutionary. During his whole life he repudiated the designs which some of the democratic party imputed to him, as well as the conclusions which they drew from his works.

Millet’s life in itself explains his art. Never have heart and hand, a man and his work, tallied with each other as they did in him. He does not belong to those painters who, even when one admires them, give one nevertheless a sense that they could just as easily have produced something different. Let any one consider his works and read the letters published in Sensier’s book: the man whom one knows from the letters lives in his works, and these works are the natural illustration of the book in which the man has depicted himself. In the unity of man and artist lies the source of his strength, the secret of his greatness.

S. Low & Co.
JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET.PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.