[Gutenberg 43068] • Millet

Amongst the great painters of peasant life the name of Jean François Millet stands out prominently. A long interval elapsed betwixt the death of Adrian van Ostade and the birth of Millet, unbroken by a single name, with the solitary exception of Chardin, of a painter who grasped the profundity of peasant life. In Holland and Flanders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we find many painters who, whilst living the humblest lives themselves, saw in their surroundings such material for treatment as has handed their names down to posterity. It is only quite recently that one of the greatest of all, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, has come to occupy his proper position in the world of art. Formerly he was looked upon as an eccentric painter, whose subjects were generally of rather a coarse nature; who, moreover, contented himself with depicting the droller side of the village life of his period, and consequently was not to be taken seriously. Of late years, however, an exhaustive research into his life and works have revealed him as one of the greatest masters in his own sphere of any time. The wonderful series of pictures in Vienna, and the solitary examples scattered about the great collections of Europe, proclaim him not only a painter, but a philosopher as well. His peasants, grotesque as they may now appear to us, possess a fidelity and vigour of handling such as none of his contemporaries possess. To him, consequently, we must look as the fountain-head of all peasant painting. His influence was immediately felt in the Low Countries, and there sprang up that wonderful school of which Adrian Brouwer, Jan Steen, and Adrian van Ostade are such brilliant exponents. In their more recent prototype—Millet—the same profound and sympathetic rendering of the everyday life of the simple peasant is to be found, tinged with the melancholy fervour of his temperament. Their temperament bears the same relation to his as the seventeenth century does to the nineteenth. A more subdued temper had come over all classes of the community, a less boisterous attitude towards life, but the struggle for existence was none the less strenuous or unending. The rollicking and reckless joy of Brouwer’s peasants, with their hard drinking and lusty bawling, was an essential feature of Dutch life of the period. But they are every whit as precious from an artistic and historical standpoint as are the placid interiors of Millet.