Even the circumstances over which he triumphed necessitated his being the painter that he actually was, if he became one at all. He was not born in a city where a child’s eyes are everywhere met by works of art—pictures which no doubt early awaken the feeling for art, but which just as easily disturb a free outlook into nature. Moreover, he did not spring from one of those families where art is itself practised, or where art is discussed and taste early guided upon definite lines. He was a peasant, whose father and grandfather were peasants before him, and whose brothers were farm labourers. He was born in 1814, far away from Paris, in a little Norman village hard by the sea, and there he grew up. The regular and majestic plunge of the waves against the granite rocks of the coast, the solemn murmurs of the ebb and flow of the sea, the moaning of the wind in the apple trees and the old oaks of his father’s garden, were the first sounds which struck upon the ear in Gruchy, near Cherbourg. It has been adduced that his father loved music, and had had success as the leader of the village choir. But though there may have always been a dim capacity for art in the youngster’s blood, there was nothing calculated to strengthen it in his education. Millet’s sturdy father had no idea of making an artist of his son; the boy saw no artist at work in the neighbourhood; nature and instinct guided him alone.

For a man brought up in a city and trained at an academy all things become hackneyed. Many centuries of artistic usage have dimmed their original freshness; and he finds a ready-made phrase coined for everything. Millet stood before the world like the first man in the day of creation. Everything seemed new to him; he was charmed and astonished, and a wild flood of impressions burst in upon him. He did not come under the influence of any tradition, but approached art like the man in the age of stone who first scratched the outline of a mammoth on a piece of ivory, or like the primæval Greek who, according to the legend, invented painting by making a likeness of his beloved with a charred stick upon a wall. No one encouraged him in his first attempts. No one dreamt that this young man was destined to any life other than that of a peasant. From the time he was fourteen until he was eighteen he did every kind of field labour upon his father’s land in the same way as his brothers—hoeing, digging, ploughing, mowing, threshing, sowing the seed, and dressing the ground. But he always had his eyes about him; he drew upon a white patch of wall, without guidance, the picture of a tree, an orchard, or a peasant whom he had chanced to meet on a Sunday when going to church. And he drew so correctly that every one recognised the likenesses. A family council was held upon the matter. His father brought one of his son’s drawings to a certain M. Mouchel in Cherbourg, a strange personage who had once been a painter and had the reputation of being a connoisseur; and he was to decide whether François “had really enough talent for painting to gain his bread by it.” So Millet, the farm-hand, was twenty when he received his first lessons in drawing. He was learning the A B C of art, but humanly speaking he was already Millet. What had roused his talent and induced him to take a stump of charcoal in his hand was not the study of any work of art, but the sight of nature—nature, the great mother of all, who had embraced him, nature with whom and through whom he lived. Through her, visions and emotions were quickened in him, and he felt the secret impulse to give them expression.

MILLET.THE HOUSE AT GRUCHY.

Of what concerned the manual part of his art he understood nothing, and his two teachers in Cherbourg, Mouchel and Langlois, who were half-barbarians themselves, gave him the less knowledge, as only two months later, in 1835, his father died, and the young man returned to his own people as a farm-labourer once more. And it was only after an interruption of three years that a subsidy from the community of Cherbourg, which was collected by his teacher Langlois, and a small sum saved by his parents—six hundred francs all told—enabled him to journey up to Paris. He was twenty-three years of age, a broad-chested Hercules in stature, for till that time he had breathed nothing but the pure, sharp sea air; his handsome face was framed in long fair locks, which fell wildly about his shoulders. What had this peasant to do in the capital! In Delaroche’s school he was called l’homme des bois. He had all the awkwardness of a provincial, and the artist was only to be surmised from the fire in the glance of his large dark blue eyes. At first Delaroche took peculiar pains with his new pupil. But to submit to training is to follow the lead of another person. A man like Millet, who knew what he wanted, was no longer to be guided upon set lines. The pictures of Delaroche made no appeal to him. They struck him as being “huge vignettes, theatrical effects without any real sentiment.” And Delaroche soon lost patience with the clumsy peasant, whom he—most unfairly—regarded as stiff-necked and obstinate.

Other aims floated before Millet, and he could not now learn to produce academical compositions, so, as these were alone demanded in the school of Delaroche, he never cleared himself from a reputation for mediocrity. It was the period of the war between the Classicists and the Romanticists. “An Ingres, a Delacroix!” was the battle-cry that rang through the Parisian studios. For Millet neither of these movements had any existence. His memory only clung to the plains of Normandy, and the labourers, shepherds, and fishermen of his home, with whom he mingled in spirit once more. Incessantly he believed himself to hear what he has called “le cri de la terre,” and neither Romanticists nor Classicists caught anything of this cry of the earth. He lived alone with his own thoughts, associating with none of his fellow-artists, and indeed keeping out of their way. Always prepared for some scornful attempt at witticism, he turned his easel round whenever he was approached, or gruffly cut all criticism short with the remark: “What does my painting matter to you? I don’t trouble my head about your bread and grease.” Thus it was that Delaroche certainly taught him very little of the technique of painting, though, at the same time, he taught him no mannerism. He did not learn to paint pretty pictures with beautiful poses, flattering colour, and faces inspired with intellect. He left the studio as he had entered it in 1837, painting with an awkward, thick, heavy, and laborious brush, though with the fresh, untroubled vision which he had had in earlier days. He was still the stranger, the incorrigible Norman peasant.

For a time he exerted himself to make concessions to the public. At seven-and-twenty he had married a Cherbourg girl, who died of consumption three years afterwards. Without acquaintances in Paris, and habituated to domestic life from his youth upwards, he married a second time in 1845. He had to earn his bread, to please, to paint what would sell. So he toiled over pretty pictures of nude women, like those which Diaz had painted with such great success—fair shepherdesses and gallant herdsmen, and bathing girls, in the genre of Boucher and Fragonard. And he who did this spoke of both of them afterwards as pornographists. But the attempt was vain, for he satisfied neither others nor himself. The peasant of Gruchy could not be piquant, easy, and charming; on the contrary, he remained helpless, awkward, and crude. “Your women bathing come from the cow-house” was the appropriate remark of Diaz in reference to these pictures. When Burger-Thoré, who was the first to take notice of Millet, declared, on the occasion of “The Milkmaid” being exhibited in 1844, that Boucher himself was surpassed in this picture, the critic took a literary licence, because he had a human pity for the poor painter. How little the picture has of the fragrance of the old masters! how laboured it seems! how obvious it is that it was painted without pleasure! Millet was not long at pains to conceal his personality. An “Œdipus” and “The Jewish Captives in Babylon” were his last rhetorical exercises. In 1848 he came forward with a manifesto—“The Winnower,” a peasant in movement and bearing, in his whole character and in the work on which he is employed. Millet returns here to the thoughts and feelings of his youth; for the future he will paint nothing but peasants in all the situations of their rude and simple life. In 1849 he made a great resolve.

F. JACQUE.MILLET AT WORK IN HIS STUDIO.
(By permission of M. F. Jacque, the owner of the copyright.)

The sale of his “Winnower” had brought him five hundred francs, and these five hundred francs gave him courage to defy the world. “Better turn bricklayer than paint against conviction.” Charles Jacque, the painter of animals, who lived opposite to him in the Rue Rochechouard, wanted to quit Paris in 1849 on account of the outbreak of cholera. He proposed that Millet should go with him into the country for a short time; he did so, and the peasant’s son of former times became once more a peasant, to end his days amongst peasants. “In the middle of the forest of Fontainebleau,” said Jacque, “there is a little nest, with a name ending in ‘zon’—not far off and cheap,—Diaz has been telling me a great deal about it.” Millet consented. One fine June day they got into a heavy, rumbling omnibus, with their wives and their five children, and they arrived in Fontainebleau that evening after two hours’ journey. “To-morrow we are going in search of our ‘zon.’” And the next day they went forward on foot to Barbizon, Millet with his two little girls upon his shoulders, and his wife carrying in her arms the youngest child, a boy of five months old, having her skirt drawn over her head as a protection against the rain.

F. JACQUE.MILLET’S HOUSE AT BARBIZON.
(By permission of M. F. Jacque, the owner of the copyright.)