Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/108

 266 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS ing the hog he has been killing ; for in those less sophisticated times, Art, no more than Poetry, despised the ruder side of rustic life. The German artists of the sixteenth century introduced peasants and peasant- life into their designs whenever the subject admitted. Albert Durer was especial- ly o-jven to this, and it often gives a particular savor, sometimes a half-humorous expression, to his treatment of even religious subjects ; as where, in his design, " The Repose in Egypt," he shows Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus, making a water-trough out of a huge log, and a bevy of cherub-urchins about him gather- ing up the chips. Mary, meanwhile, as the peasant mother, sits by, spinning and rocking the cradle of the Holy Child with her foot. But these examples onlv serve to make clearer the fact that in the earlier times there was no place found in art for the representation of the laboring man, whether in the field or in the shop, except as an illustration of some allegorical or religious theme. Nor in the Dutch pictures that Louis XIV. despised, and that our own time finds so valuable for their artistic qualities, was there anything outside of their beauty or richness of tone or color to redeem their coarseness and vulgarity. There was no poetry in the treatment, nor any sympathy with anything higher than the grossest guzzling, fighting, and horseplay. The great monarch, who, according to his lights, was a man of delicacy and refinement, was certainly right in contemning such subjects, and it is perhaps to his credit that he did not care enough for " Art for Art's sake " to excuse the brutality of the theme for the sake of the beauty of the painting. The next appearance of the peasant in art was of a very different sort, and represented a very different state of social feeling from the " peasants " of the Dutch painters. In the Salon of 1850 there appeared a picture called "The Sower " and representing a young peasant sowing grain. There was nothing in the subject to connect it particularly with any religious symbolism — not even with the Parable of the Sower who went forth to sow ; nor with any series of personifications of the months. This was a simple peasant of the Norman coast, in his red blouse and blue trousers, his legs wrapped in straw, and his weather- beaten hat, full of holes. He marches with the rhythmic step made necessary by his task, over the downs that top the high cliffs, followed by a cloud of crows that pounce upon the grain as he sows it. At first sight there would seem to be nothing in this picture to call for particular notice ; but the public, the artists the critics, were with one accord strongly drawn to it. Something in the picture appealed to feelings deeper than mere curiosity, and an interest was excited such as did not naturally belong to a picture of a man sowing a field of grain. The secret was this : that a man born and bred in the midst of laboring people, strug- gling with the hard necessities of life — himself a laborer, and one who knew by experience all the lights and shades of the laborer's life — had painted this picture out of his own deep sympathy with his fellows, and to please himself by repro- ducing the most significant and poetical act in the life of the farmer. The painter of this picture, the first man of our time to give the laborer in the fields and on the farm a place in art, and to set people to thinking about him,