: McClure's Magazine Vol. 6 No. 6 May 1896 by Various - Literature Periodicals; American literature Periodicals McClure's Magazine

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MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE.

MAY, 1896.

No. 6.

A CENTURY OF PAINTING.

JEAN FRAN?OIS MILLET.--PARENTAGE AND EARLY INFLUENCES.--HIS LIFE AT BARBIZON.--VISITS TO MILLET IN HIS STUDIO.--HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE.--HIS OWN COMMENTS ON HIS PICTURES.--PASSAGES FROM HIS CONVERSATION.

BY WILL H. LOW.

These papers, disclaiming any other authority than that which appertains to the conclusions of a practising painter who has thought deeply on the subject of his art, have nevertheless avoided the personal equation as much as possible. A conscientious endeavor has been made to consider the work of each painter in the place which has been assigned him by the concensus of opinion in the time which has elapsed since his work was done. In the consideration of Jean Fran?ois Millet, however, I desire for the nonce to become less impersonal, for the reason that it was my privilege to know him slightly, and in the case of one who as a man and as a painter occupies a place so entirely his own, the value of recorded personal impressions is greater, at least for purposes of record, than the registration of contemporary opinion concerning him.

I must further explain that, as a young student who received at his hands the kindly reception which the master, stricken in health, and preoccupied with his work, vouchsafed, I could only know him superficially. It may have been the spectacle of youthful enthusiasm, or the modest though dignified recognition of the reverence with which I approached him, that made this grave man unbend; but it is certain that the few times when I was permitted to enter the rudely built studio at Barbizon have remained red-letter days in my life, and on each occasion I left Millet with an impression so strong and vital that now, after a lapse of twenty years, the work which he showed me, and the words which he uttered, are as present as though it all had occurred yesterday. The reverence which I then felt for this great man was born of his works, a few of which I had seen in 1873 in Paris; and their constant study, and the knowledge of his life and character gained since then, have intensified this feeling.

Jean Fran?ois Millet was born October 4, 1814, in the hamlet of Gruchy, a mere handful of houses which lie in a valley descending to the sea, in the department of the Manche, not far from Cherbourg. He was the descendant of a class which has no counterpart in England or America, and which in his native France has all but disappeared. The rude forefathers of our country may have in a degree resembled the French peasant of Millet's youth; but their Protestant belief made them more independent in thought, and the problems of a new country, and the lack of stability inherent to the colonist, robbed them of the fanatical love of the earth, which is perhaps the strongest trait of the peasant. Every inch of the ground up to the cliffs above the sea, in Millet's country, represented the struggle of man with nature; and each parcel of land, every stone in the walls which kept the earth from being engulfed in the floods beneath, bore marks of his handiwork. Small wonder, then, that this rude people should engender the painter who has best expressed the intimate relation between the man of the fields and his ally and foe, the land which he subjugates, and which in turn enslaves him. The inherent, almost savage, independence of the peasant had kept him freer and of a nobler type than the English yokel even in the time before the Revolution, and in the little hamlet where Millet was born, the great upheaval had meant but little. Remote from the capital, cultivating land which but for their efforts would have been abandoned as worthless, every man was a land-owner in a small degree, and the patrimony of Millet sufficed for a numerous family of which he was the eldest son. Sufficed, that is, for a Spartan subsistence, made up of unrelaxing toil, with few or no comforts, save those of a spiritual nature which came in the guise of religion.

Millet was reared by his grandmother, such being the custom of the country; the younger women being occupied in the service of the mastering earth, and the elders, no longer able to go afield, bringing up the children born to their children, who in turn replaced their parents in the never-ending struggle. This grandmother, Louise Jumelin, widow of Nicolas Millet, was a woman of great force of character, and extremely devout. The most ordinary occupation of the day was made the subject not of uttered prayer, for that would have entailed suspension of her ceaseless activity, but of spiritual example tersely expressed, which fell upon the fruitful soil of Millet's young imagination, and left such a lasting impression that to the end of his life his natural expression was almost Biblical in character of language.

Another formative influence of this young life was that of a granduncle, Charles Millet, a priest who, driven from his church by the Revolution, had returned to his native village and taken up the simple life of his people, without, however, abandoning his vocation. He was to be seen behind his plough, his priest's robe gathered up about his loins, his breviary in one hand, following the furrow up and down the undulating fields which ran to the cliffs.

Gifted with great strength, he piled up great masses of granite, to reclaim a precious morsel of earth from the hungry maw of the sea; lifting his voice, as he worked, in resonant chants of the church. He it was who taught Millet to read; and, later, it was another priest, the Abb? Jean Lebrisseux, who, in the intervals of the youth's work in the fields, where he had early become an efficient aid to his father, continued his instruction. With the avidity of intelligence Millet profited by this instruction, not only in the more ordinary studies, but in Latin, with the Bible and Virgil as text-books. His mind was also nourished by the books belonging to the scanty library of his granduncle. These were of a purely religious character--the "History of the Saints," the "Confessions" of St. Augustine, the letters of St. Jerome, and the works of Bossuet and F?nelon.

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