Page:François-Millet.djvu/204

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET Some criticised while others admired their application to the subjects which he treated; but none found it possible to deny their existence. The names of Homer, Michael Angelo and Raphael, recollections of the Bible and comparisons with antique art appear again and again when Millet's work is spoken of in articles upon the Salons from 1853 to 1875. Gautier said of the Harvesters' meal of 1853; "Some of these thick-set peasants display a Florentine air and lie in attitudes that might be those of Michael Angelo's statues. They have the majesty of toilers in touch with nature." Paul de St Victor, in turn, writes: "The picture of the Harvesters is a Homeric idyll translated into a rustic dialect. The countrymen seated in the shadow of the heaped up corn have a splendid animal, primitive ugliness, like that of the Æginetic statues and of the figures of captives sculptured on Egyptian tombs." Gautier says of the Peasant grafting a tree, in 1855: "The man has the appearance of accomplishing some rite of a mystic ceremonial, or of being the obscure priest of some rustic deity." About the Gleaners he says, "I might almost say that 186