MILLET. THE PEASANT PAINTER

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 379, 13 June 1928, Page 6

MILLET. THE PEASANT PAINTER

In a little street in the village of Barbizon stands the house where Millet lived and died. The house itself is a peasant’s cottage, for Millet was very poor. When the cholera raged in Paris he went with his family to the quiet village on the edge of the great forest of Fontainebleau, and there, with his wife and children, he lived, working, as the peasants did and drawing studies of them for his pictures. All the morning he worked in the field and garden, and in the afternoon he painted. A stone stair leads from the garden to the upper rooms of the cottage, and beside it stands still the fine elm tree he planted. What is new tho village street was just a grassgrown track where cattle browsed when Millet went there. Among the sketches and pictures hanging on the walls of a small room set aside for them is one representing a shepherdess, painted by Millet when he lived in Paris and before he came to Barbizon. It shows the conventional type of tripping figure, gaily clad, as are the girl shepherds depicted in the works of Watteau. But Millet was a peasant, and h« was sincere. He revolted from this false representation of the life of the fields, and set to work to ps-int those who worked in them in their rough clothes ahd their wooden sabcts, proving that beauty of the most truthful, human and appealing kind could thereby be achieved. But his paintings aroused fierce opposite* He had dared to paint truth and teadi art by the portrayal of simple thingsthe sowe.r of the seed, the gleaners at harvest time, the cattle going down to the water’s edge to drirk; anu hardness of daily toil, its struggles and its disappointments sweetened W belief in God and by humble prayw All these things Millet faithfully P 01 ’ trayed in his pictures. Perhaps his most familiar picture - The Angelus. When it was sola fetched a thousand francs, but now is valued at five millions. Millet was poor to the end *3 things of this world, but in the PJJJJI sions of the soul he was rich infl His great friend Rousseau, also artist, lived near him, and when M was in poverty Rousseau used -o his family secretly. In the fores - Fontainebleau is a rock on W"* 6 ** heads of the two friends have carved side by side. . There are a few well- worn booKs Millet’s room above his bed, hi» ' bis Virgil, and the contemporary of his day. In the corner o studio stands an old grand! clock; his palette and his knn near his easel, and above tnem tho model of a sailing ship- w His brushes are in the old & e in which they used to stand. - nlir The spirit of the peasant paw still seems to linger in the h loved so well.