Page:Woman in Art.djvu/58

WOMAN IN ART by the hand of man, lending to the canvas beauty, grace, and strength. The Maid of Orleans has been the theme for many painters, and the large canvas in the Metropolitan Museum in New York is one of the largest and most interesting. Bastien Lepage has visualized the spirit who from overhanging boughs of leafage whispers the message of her country's need to the wondering maid. Her homely duties forgotten, her soul absorbs and her mind cons the plight of the nation.

Jules Eugene Lenepveu has put the story into five scenes as mural history, on the walls of the Pantheon in Paris. Her life was short, but in those months between her call to arms and the call for her soul to arise from the flaming pyre, the painter has shown that experience developed her soul, and so deepened the modeling of her face.

We turn again to Holland.

There are some pictures of woman's life in Holland that do not need to be photographed to be remembered. A Saturday sunset enticed the writer to walk along a country dyke. Willows leaned toward the unruffled water below. A mile from the little hamlet on the opposite side of the canal, a tiny cottage stood in the midst of its garden. Close to the house a few trees red with cherries and a few clothes on the line caught a high-light from the sun. A buxom woman came to the water's edge and dumped an apronful of sabots—assorted sizes—on the grass. Down she knelt, produced a small scrub brush and a cake of soap, and began the weekly scrub of the family "shoon, the wooden shoon." Returning half an hour later there they were, arranged in two rows—eighteen sabots, clean and white; presumably every pair of them went to kirk next morning.

High or lowly, of private interpretation of public service, such are maids and madonnas of duty and every-day life; saints of the home.

Through intervening centuries the social status of woman in Europe has been sad and degrading in many ways. Education beyond a certain point was denied her; house and field duties enslaved her body and mind—ignorance was an incubus on her life and influence as a woman. By slow degrees she has been emancipated, but only in part. The deep lines of demarkation between royalty, nobility, clergy, and peasantry have been held taut to the outbreak of the World War. Warfare with its suffering and death brings humanity to a common level, but not all at once—that is a fine art that belongs to Time.

A new art came to France, and hence to the world, in the early part of the nineteenth century, through the heart and mind of Jean Francois Millet. 40