As yet the forest had no walks laid out as it has to-day; it was virgin nature, which had never been disturbed. “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, que c’est beau!” cried Millet, exulting. Once more he stood in the presence of nature, the old love of his youth. The impressions of childhood rushed over him. Born in the country, he had to return to the country to be himself once again. He arrived at Ganne’s inn just as the dinner-hour had assembled twenty persons at the table, artists with their wives and children. “New painters! The pipe, the pipe!” was the cry which greeted the fresh arrivals. Diaz rose, and, in spite of his wooden leg, did the honours of the establishment to the two women with the dignity of a Spanish nobleman, and then turned gravely to Millet and Jacque, saying: “Citizens, you are invited to smoke the pipe of peace.” Whenever the colony of Barbizon received an addition this was always taken down from its sacred place above the door. An expressly appointed jury had then to decide from the ascending rings of smoke whether the new-comer was to be reckoned amongst the “Classicists” or the “Colourists.” Jacque was with one voice declared to be a “Colourist.” As to Millet’s relation to the schools, there was a discrepancy of opinion. “Eh bien,” said Millet, “si vous êtes embarrassés, placez-moi dans la mienne.” Whereupon Diaz, as the others would not let this pass, cried: “Be quiet; it is a good retort, and the fellow looks powerful enough to found a school which will bury us all.” He was right, even though it was late before his prophecy was fulfilled.

Quantin, Paris.Neurdein Frères, photo.
MILLET.THE WINNOWER.MILLET.A MAN MAKING FAGGOTS.
(By permission of M. Charles Millet.)

Millet was thirty-five when he settled in Barbizon; he had reached the age which Dante calls the middle point of life. He had no further tie with the outward world; he had broken all the bridges behind him, and relied upon himself. He only went back to Paris on business, and he always did so unwillingly and for as short a time as possible. He lived at Barbizon in the midst of nature and in the midst of his models, and to his last day unreservedly gave himself up to the work which in youth he had felt himself called to fulfil. Neither criticism, mockery, nor contempt could lead him any more astray; even if he had wished it, he would have been incapable of following the paths of official art. “Mes critiques,” said he as though by way of excuse, “sont gens instruits et de goût, mais je ne peux me mettre dans leur peau, et comme je n’ai jamais vu de ma vie autre chose que les champs, je tâche de dire comme je peux ce que j’y ai éprouvé quand j’y travaillais.” When such a man triumphs, when he succeeds in forcing upon the world his absolutely personal art, it is not Mahomet who has come to the mountain, but the mountain to Mahomet.

Millet’s life has been, in consequence, a continuous series of renunciations. It is melancholy to read in Sensier’s biography that such a master, even during his Paris days, was forced to turn out copies at twenty francs and portraits at five, and to paint tavern signs or placards for the booths of rope-dancers and horse-dealers, each one of which brought him in a roll of thick sous. When the Revolution of June broke out his capital consisted of thirty francs, which the owner of a small shop had paid him for a sign, and on this he and his family lived for a fortnight. In Barbizon he boarded with a peasant and lived with his family in a tiny room where wheat was stored and where bread was baked twice in the week; then he took a little house at a hundred and sixty francs a year. In winter he sat in a workroom without a fire, in thick straw shoes and with an old horse-cloth over his shoulders. Living like this he painted “The Sower,” that marvellous strophe in his great poem on the earth. By the produce of a vegetable garden he endeavoured to increase his income, lived on credit with grocer and butcher, and at last had creditors in every direction—in particular Gobillot, the baker of Chailly, from whom he often hid at his friend Jacque’s.

He was forced to accept a loaf from Rousseau for his famishing family, and small sums with which he was subsidised by Diaz. “I have received the hundred francs,” he writes in a letter to Sensier, “and they came just at the right time; neither my wife nor I had tasted food for four-and-twenty hours. It is a blessing that the little ones, at any rate, have not been in want.”

Levy et ses Fils, photo.
MILLET.THE GLEANERS.

All his efforts to exhibit in Paris were vain. Even in 1859 “Death and the Woodcutter” was rejected by the Salon. The public laughed, being accustomed to peasants in a comic opera, and, at best, his pictures were honoured by a caricature in a humorous paper. Even the most delicate connoisseurs had not the right historical perspective to appreciate the greatness of Millet, so far was it in advance of the age. And all this is so much the sadder when one thinks of the price which his works fetched at a later period, when one reads that drawings for which he could get with difficulty from twenty to forty francs are the works for which as many thousands are now offered. It was only from the middle of the fifties that he began to sell at the rate of from two hundred and fifty to three hundred francs a picture. Rousseau was the first to offer him a large sum, buying his “Woodcutter” for four thousand francs, on the pretext that an American was the purchaser. Dupré helped him to dispose of “The Gleaners” for two thousand francs. An agreement which the picture-dealer Arthur Stevens, brother of Stevens the painter, concluded with him had to be dissolved six months afterwards, since Millet’s time had not yet come. At last, in 1863, when he painted four large decorative pictures—“The Four Seasons,” which are, by the way, his weakest works—for the dining-room of the architect Feydau, superfluity came in place of need. He was then in a position, like Rousseau and Jacque, to buy himself a little house in Barbizon, close to the road by which the place is entered and opposite Ganne’s inn. Wild vine, ivy, and jessamine clambered round it, and two bushes of white roses twisted their branches around the window. It was surrounded by a large garden, in which field-flowers bloomed amongst vegetables and fruit-trees, whilst a border of white roses and elders led to another little house which he used as a studio. Behind was a poultry-yard, and behind that again a thickly grown little shrubbery. Here he lived, simple and upright, with his art and his own belongings, as a peasant and a father of a family, like an Old Testament patriarch. His father had had nine children, and he himself had nine. While he painted the little ones played in the garden, the elder daughters worked, and when the younger children made too much noise, Jeanne, who was seven years old, would say with gravity, “Chut! Papa travaille.” After the evening meal he danced his youngest boy upon his knee and told Norman tales, or they all went out together into the forest, which the children called la forêt noire, because it was so wild, gloomy, and magnificent.

Millet’s poverty was not quite so great as might be supposed from Sensier’s book. Chintreuil, Théodore Rousseau, and many others were acquainted with poverty likewise, and bore it with courage. It may even be said that, all things considered, success came to Millet early. The real misfortune for an artist is to have had success, to have been rich, and later to see himself forgotten when he is stricken with poverty. Millet’s course was the opposite. From the beginning of the sixties his reputation was no longer in question. At the World Exhibition of 1867 he was showered with all outward honours. He was represented by nine pictures and received the great medal. The whole world knew his name, subsistence was abundantly assured to him, and all the younger class of artists honoured him like a god. In the Salon of 1869 he was on the hanging committee. The picture-dealers, who had passed him by in earlier days, now beset his doors; he lived to see his “Woman with the Lamp” for which he had received a hundred and fifty francs, sold for thirty-eight thousand five hundred at Richard’s sale. “Allons, ils commencent à comprendre que c’est de la peinture serieuse.” M. de Chennevières commissioned him to take part in the paintings in the Panthéon, and he began the work. But strength was denied him; he was prostrated by a violent fever, and on 20th January 1875, at six o’clock in the morning, Millet was dead. He was then sixty.

Mansell & Co.
MILLET.THE WOOD SAWYERS.