After he had settled at Barbizon, Millet, whose peasant origin was
probably the cause of his intense sympathy with the struggles and
hardships of the field labourers’ fatiguing work, devoted his brush
to creating that profoundly moving record of labour and toil which
constitutes his claim to be considered one of the world’s great
masters. He knew how to invest scenes of humble life with truly
monumental grandeur, and brought out the hopeless monotony and cruel
hardships of the life led by the tillers of the soil with such incisive
strength, that he was accused of propagandist tendencies. Nothing,
however, was further from his aim. He was an artist pure and simple,
who, in following his own unpopular ideal, preferred to suffer neglect
and extreme poverty to a compromise with the taste of the vulgar.
The _Women Gleaning_ (No. 644, Plate LII.) may be considered his
supreme achievement, and an epitome of his whole art. Millet alone
could have invested so bald and unpromising a subject with so much epic
grandeur. There is in the rhythmic repetition of the action of the
two women in the centre of the composition a sense of the inevitable
hopeless monotony of labour in the fields, even if the picture is
not “a plea against the misery of the people.” The same struggle for
existence and the resulting physical fatigue are admirably expressed
in the statuesquely silhouetted figure of _The Weed-burner_ (No.
2890). _The Woodcutter_ (No. 2895), _The Strawbinders_ (No. 2892), and
_The Winnower_ (No. 2893) all exemplify this phase of Millet’s art.
The domestic life of the peasantry is treated with equally profound
sympathy in _Maternal Precaution_ (No. 2894), _La Couseuse_ (No. 644A),
and _La Lessiveuse_ (No. 2891). Among his comparatively rare pure
landscape subjects _The Church of Gréville_ (No. 641), which was found
in an unfinished state in the artist’s studio after his death, takes
very high rank. It is as remarkable for the simple telling truth with
which the normal aspect of the landscape is rendered, as the _Spring_
(No. 643) is for the realisation of a more uncommon effect—a rainbow
and the shrill accent of sunlight in the orchard under the leaden grey
of the departing thunder clouds.