The Louvre is fortunate in possessing no fewer than a dozen pictures by
Jean François Millet (1814-1875), the great painter of the peasant’s
unceasing struggle with the forces of nature to gain his livelihood
from the soil. Millet himself was the son of a peasant, and was kept
busy with farm work until he had attained the age of twenty, when
he began to study art at Cherbourg. His studies were repeatedly
interrupted before he definitely took up art as his profession. Before
he went to Barbizon, in 1849, to devote himself exclusively to the
genre in which he was to achieve immortal fame, he gained popular
favour and admission to the Salon by following the eighteenth-century
tradition of mythological art, and painted a number of nude studies
of nymphs, goddesses, and cupids, not unlike in style to those
of Diaz, but already marked by that firmness of design and by the
monumental character that are so remarkable in his later work. The
study of _Bathing Women_ (No. 642) belongs to that period.
[Illustration:
PLATE LI.—CHARLES FRANÇOIS DAUBIGNY
(1817-1878)