Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/340

Rh 322 M I L M I L pressing calls from without were solemnly enforced by the wishes of his own family. He accordingly went back to Cherbourg, but after a short time spent there with another master (Langlois) started with many misgivings for Paris. The council-general of the department had granted him a sum of 600 francs, and the town council promised an , annual pension of 400, but in spite of friendly help and introductions Millet went through great difficulties. The system of the Ecole des Beaux Arts was hateful to him, : and it was not until after much hesitation that he decided to enter an official studio that of Delaroche. The master | was certainly puzzled by his pupil ; he saw his ability, and, when Millet in his poverty could not longer pay the monthly fees, arranged for his free admission to the studio, but he tried in vain to make him take the approved direc tion, and lessons ended with &quot; Eh, bien, allez k votre guise, vous 6tes si nouveau pour moi que je ne veux rien vous dire.&quot; At last, when the competition for the Grand Prix came on, Delaroche gave Millet to understand that he intended to secure the nomination of another, and there upon Millet withdrew himself, and with his friend Marolle started in a little studio in the Rue de 1 Est. He had renounced the beaten track, but he continued to study hard whilst he sought to procure bread by painting por traits at 10 or 15 francs a piece and producing small &quot; pastiches &quot; of Watteau and Boucher. These works are classed as those of his &quot; flowery manner,&quot; and Millet has been reproached he whose whole life was an act of con viction -with having sacrificed his convictions to curry favour with the public. It is true that he himself has recorded his aversion to both these masters. &quot;In the Louvre,&quot; he said, &quot;I received vivid impressions from Mantegna, complete from Michelangelo ; after Michelangelo and Poussin I have remained faithful to the early masters.&quot; Boucher was for him an object of &quot;repulsion,&quot; and in Watteau &quot; I saw,&quot; he said, &quot; a little theatrical world which oppressed me.&quot; Thus it was then that Millet naturally felt and saw, but the strongest genius knows moments of self-doubt. Later in life Millet was heard to say that were it not for the small group who believed in him he should have lost faith in himself. In earlier years, before he was certain of his own leading, he was naturally influ enced by the advice of others whose arguments were enforced by the pressure of dire poverty. Even so from time to time the native vein showed strong. In 1840, as soon as he had despatched a portrait to the Salon, Millet went back to Gre&quot; ville, where he painted Sailors Mending a Sail and a few other pictures reminiscences of Cherbourg life. His first success was obtained in 1844 when his Milkwoman and Lesson in Riding (pastel) attracted notice at the Salon, and friendly artists presented themselves at his lodgings only to learn that his wife had just died, and that he him self had disappeared. Millet was at Cherbourg ; there he remarried, but having amassed a few hundred francs he went back to Paris and presented his St Jerome at the Salon of 1845. This picture was rejected and exists no longer, for Millet, short of canvas, painted over it QEdipus Unbound, a work which during the following year was the object of violent criticism. He was, however, no longer alone ; Diaz, Eugene Tourneux, Rousseau, and other men of note supported him by their confidence and friendship, and he had by his side the brave Catharine Lemaire, his second wife, a woman who bore poverty with dignity and gave courage to her husband through the cruel trials in which he penetrated by a terrible personal experience the bitter secrets of the very poor. To this date belong Millet s Golden Age, Bird Nesters, Young Girl and Lamb, and Bathers ; but to the Bathers (Louvre) succeeded The Mother Asking Alms, The Workman s Monday, and The Winnower. This last work, exhibited in 1 848, obtained conspicuous success, but did not sell till Ledru Rollin, informed of the painter s dire distress, gave him 500 francs for it, and accompanied the purchase with a commission, the money for which enabled Millet to leave Paris for Barbizon, a village on the skirts of the forest of Fontaine- bleau. There he settled in a three-roomed cottage for the rest of his life twenty-seven years, in which he wrought out the perfect story of that peasant life of which he alone has given a &quot; complete impression.&quot; Jules Breton has coloured the days of toil with sentiment ; others, like Courbet, whose eccentric Funeral at Ornans attracted more notice at the Salon of 1850 than Millet s Sowers and Binders, have treated similar subjects as a vehicle for protest against social misery ; Millet alone, a peasant and a miserable one himself, saw true, neither softening nor exaggerating what he saw. In a curious letter written to M. Sensier at this date (1850) Millet expressed his resolve to break once and for all with mythological and undraped subjects, and the names of the principal works painted subsequently will show how stedfastly this resolution was kept. In 1852 he produced Girls Sewing, Man Spreading Manure; 1853, The Reapers; 1854, Church at Gre ville (Luxembourg) ; 1855 the year of the International Exhibition, at which he received a medal of second class Peasant Grafting a Tree; 1857, The Gleaners; 1859, The Angelus (Louvre, engraved Waltner), The Woodcutter and Death; 1860, Sheep Shearing; 1861, Woman Shearing Sheep, Woman Feeding Child; 1862, Potato Planters, Winter and the Crows; 1863, Man with Hoe, Woman Carding; 1864, Shepherds and Flock, Peasants Bringing Home a Calf Born in the Fields ; 1869, Knitting Lesson ; 1870, Buttermaking ; 1871, November recollection of Gruchy. Any one of these works will show how great an influence Millet s previous practice in the nude had upon his style. The dresses worn by his figures are not clothes, but drapery through which the forms and movements of the body are strongly felt, and their contour shows a grand breadth of line which strikes the eye at once. Something of the imposing unity of his work was also, no doubt, due to an extraordinary power of memory, which enabled Millet to paint (like Horace Vernet) without a model ; he could recall with precision the smallest details of attitudes or gestures which he proposed to represent. Thus he could count on presenting free from after thoughts the vivid impressions which he had first received, and Millet s nature was such that the impressions which he received were always of a serious and often of a noble order, to which the character of his execution responded so perfectly that even a Washerwoman at her Tub will show the grand action of a Medea. The drawing of this subject is repro duced in /Souvenirs de Barbizon, a pamphlet in which M. Pie dagnel has recorded a visit paid to Millet in 1864. His circumstances were then less evil, after struggles as severe as those endured in Paris. A contract by which he bound himself in 1860 to give up all his work for three years had placed him in possession of 1000 francs a month. His fame extended, and at the exhibition of 1867 he received a medal of the first class, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, but he was at the same moment deeply shaken by the death of his faithful friend Rousseau. Though he rallied for a time he never com pletely recovered his health, and on the 20th January 1875 he died. He was buried by his friend s side in the churchyard of Chailly. See A. Sensier, Vie ct (Euurc de J. F. Millet, 1874 ; Piedagnel, Souvenirs de Barbizon, &c. (E. F. S. P.) MILLVILLE, a city of the United States, in Cumberland county, New Jersey, at the head of navigation of Maurice river, 40 miles by rail from Philadelphia by the Cape May, Millville, and Vineland section of the West Jersey Railroad.