Jean-Francois Millet and the Barbizon school

Preface

SINCE writing the study of Jean-Fran9ois Millet included in this book, it has been my good fortune to have verified my own convictions that the sorrows of the peasant-painter's life have been, by certain writers, very much exaggerated. While in conversation with a well-known collector and possessor of many beautiful pictures by Millet, I mentioned that the creator of a certain drawing, at which we were looking, could never have been as unhappy a man as Millet was generally represented to be. The answer that I received was, "No, he was not always unhappy. Many a time have I talked at length with Madame Millet about her husband, and she assured me that at Barbizon Millet was far from unhappy: there he had everything that he wanted."

To the various owners and others by whose kind permission I have been able to reproduce the pictures in my volume, including Sir John Day, Messrs. Obach, the authorities of the Victoria and Albert Museum, M. Durand-Ruel, and Mr. Henry Willett, I offer my best thanks. As what is biographical in these pages is vi PREFACE

naturally based on prior records, it is scarcely necessary to refer to all the authorities whose writings have been consulted. A list, however, of some of the principal works from which I have gathered my information is here given, and to those of these authors who are still alive I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness: ''La Vie et I'CEuvre de J. F. Millet," A. Sensier; ''Souvenirs sur Theodore Rousseau," A. Sensier; "Jean-Fran9ois Millet," W. E. Henley; "The Painters of Barbizon," John W. Mollet; "Jean-Fran9ois Millet," Julia Cartwright; " The Barbizon School, " D. C. Thomson; "Peintres et Sculpteurs Contemporains,"J. Claretie; "Maitres et Petits Maitres," P. Burty; "J. F. Millet, Souvenirs de Barbizon," Alexandre Piedagnel.

Arthur Tomson.

Wareham, Dorset, September^ 1903-

Contents

PAGE

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction ....... i

Introduction

IT is due very possibly far more to the extraordinary personality of Millet, than to the actual circumstances which attended his career, that his biographers have with few exceptions accentuated, perhaps I may say overaccentuated, the tragical side of the painter's life. His deprivations have been taken note of, and they were not hard to see, but all that came to him by way of compensation for his suffering has received hitherto but very scant recognition.

Far be it from me to insist that Millet's journey through life was an easy one. Hunger he felt, and the need of many other necessities besides food ; and worse, it was his lot often to see those who were dependent on him, his wife and his children, with their wants unsatisfied ; yet Millet's life cannot have been, as Alfred Sensier would have us believe, one long foreshadowing of the terrors of Purgatory. He suffered certainly, but he had within him far more sources of happiness than belong to the majority of human beings ; and was there ever such a life as Millet's, one that from the cradle to the grave was pursued in a course so even, without any deviation, without any retrogressions? Every recorded thought and

B action of Millet's ; every influence that surrounded him, his joys and his sufferings, that we know of ; all appear to have been especially appointed to bring about the full development of his artistic powers.

Millet was born of peasant folk, and from them he had the habit of simple living, and a powerful physique. From them he obtained too his great tenderness towards the people, whom he was destined to delineate so powerfully. By working with his folk upon the farm he had not only the opportunity of incessantly watching the appearance of figures in different sorts of toil, but he obtained as well an actual knowledge of the farm-labourer's crafts. He learnt how to plough, and how to sow ; he learnt all about the peculiar nature of all kinds of crops, and every kind of domestic animal ; and he became acquainted with the discomfort, with the agony, that arises from continuous bodily exertion; with all that a farm-labourer suffers from exposure to scorching sun, and biting wind, or frost.

Nor did this family of peasants, from which Millet sprang, endow the boy merely with bodily strength, and accustom him to a life that was irksome and full of hardships. You will go to perdition for having kept him so long," said the first drawing-master to whom Millet's father showed his son's drawings. But indeed MiWet pere had little reason for loading his soul with remorse. Himself the possessor of a delightful musical talent, he had recognized and encouraged, to the best of his opportunity, everything that was artistic in his son's temperament. No time had in fact been lost by Jean-Fran9ois in the little farm in the valley by the seashore. It was as if each member of the Millet household had some premonition of the great future of the boy who was growing up in their midst, and each one, like the fairy god-parents, brought some gift or knowledge that was to be of special use to him hereafter. The strong religious belief that was a.t the bottom of so much of his art, and that influenced his entire career, was due more particularly to the teaching of his grandmother, in whose hands rested not a little of the child's early training. Francis of Assisi was her patron saint, and after this saint the boy was named, and together with the name the boy seems to have been endowed with at least some of the attributes of the great lover of all things created by God. The saint's great love of the sky, and the flowers, and the fields was Millet's ; so was his great understanding of the birds and the beasts— of all the little helpless beings that look to man for safety and assistance. Saint Francis's sympathy with all his fellow-creatures was shared also to a great extent by Millet — was it not indeed the very soul of his art ? — and that comprehension of pain and suffering ; of their necessity in this world ; of their place in the development of the soul, the essence of all the teaching of Saint Francis, did not Millet also teach the same gospel ? His life was one long propagation of it ; hardly one of his later works but has this same teaching for its particular message.

There are those who of course will say if Millet was gifted to some extent with the wide sympathies that were a part of the holy man of Assisi, he, at any rate, had none of that joyousness of manner which was so characteristic of Saint Francis. If we are to trust implicitly in some of the descriptions of the great painter, certainly he had not ; and it was his sterner moods that Millet loved best to have recorded, and of which he himself liked best to write. Of a certain photograph of the artist — a well-known photograph, a portrait that was obviously taken when the artist was very conscious of what was going on — Sensier said to him : "You look like a leader of peasants who is about to be shot." And Sensier further records that his remark on the picture was very well received by Millet. But for all this there is evidence that his attitude of mind was not habitually a grave one; and we have evidence that Millet could not only be genial, but was a lover of laughter; no matter into what abysmal depths his moods occasionally led him. Millet was the father of nine children. Was a man who cared to collect so many young people about him likely to be given over entirely to sorrow ? It is scarcely possible. And that he was fond of his children we know. His letters to Sensier tell of his concern about this infant or that, which happened to be passing through some crisis incidental to childhood; and both Mr. Edward Wheelwright and Mr. Wyatt Eaton, his pupils and friends, tell us that every evening he played with his children ; an habitually stern man does not play with his children, because they will not play with him.

That Millet was a good playfellow we can have no doubt. No one who understood children as he did could have been otherwise ; no one with the gift of drawing children in so many playful attitudes can have been but a sympathizer with them, and a partaker in their gayer moods. For this love of children, and this understanding of them, he must have owed not a little to his grandmother, to Louise Jumelin, who made his own childhood a precious memory, to the woman who used to awaken him from his sleep with these sweet words — words which must have acted as a charm to him through the whole day, aye, through his whole life-time: '^Wake up, my little Franfois, you don't know how long the birds have been singing the glory of God." One who could arouse her little charge with a greeting so gentle had certainly a claim to name him after the saint who, in a somewhat similar manner, began his well-known address to a great company of birds : My little sisters, the birds, much bounden are ye unto God, your Creator, and alway in every place ought ye to praise Him, for that He hath given you liberty to fly about everywhere, and hath also given you double and triple raiment."

When Jean-Fran9ois grew beyond the care of his grandmother there were at hand those who were well qualified to further his progress in life. Of his father we have already made mention. To his knowledge of music — he taught the parish choir of Gruchy — this gentle peasant possessed certain vague yearnings towards the graphic arts, which his son makes manifest to us by the remembrance of such remarks as these : Look at that tree — how large and beautiful ! It is beautiful as a flower." And on another occasion, this time an observation that might have come almost from the artist himself : See that house half buried by the field is good : it seems to me that it ought to be drawn that way."

But by the side of Jean-Fran9ois moved a figure that had perhaps as much effect upon his early boyhood as this excellent parent. This was Charles Millet, his greatuncle, and a priest, who divided his time in labouring upon the farm and in attending to his little nephews and nieces, or in giving instruction to the children of the neighbourhood. A picturesque person is this uncle of Millet's, strong in body and strong in mind ; sometimes he is presented to us, in Jean-Fran9ois' letters, as a Herculean person, engaged in building up a wall of stones which four ordinary men could scarcely lift ; at another time he is presented to us in cassock and surplice performing mass before some naughty little boys, with Jean- Fran9ois Millet among their number. But at all times this priest impressed upon his great-nephew the necessity of being industrious, upright and courageous ; and from him proceeded the foundation of that education — an education which was developed afterwards by the Abbe Herpent and the Abbe Lebrisseux, two cures of Gruchy — an education that sent Millet more suitably equipped for the task that lay before him than has been possibly any artist whose name has been written large in history.

Happy was Millet in his instructors, happy were his instructors in their pupil. Millet had no yearning after trivial knowledge ; while his instructors might have had but one desire, which was to impart to him just the teaching that was most suitable to a boy who was to become a great painter of outdoor subjects. Latin he learnt, and he was soon able to translate the Bucolics and the Georgics with so much facility that it was possible for him to recognize their true poetry. We are told that Virgil's words, ''It is the hour when the great shadows descend upon the plain," first revealed to the boy the beauty of his own surroundings, and first lit that fire which was to be productive of some of the finest renderings of evening scenes that the world is likely ever to possess.

Nor did Millet's education proceed only while he remained in the hands of his far-seeing instructors. At home he read not only the books he had been taught to read, including the Bible and Virgil, but he devoured eagerly all the literature that was in the family library. And what a library it was ! To one cognizant with the reading of an English farmer, wealthy or not wealthy, its list of books seems almost incredible. The lives of the saints he found there, and the Confessions of Saint Augustine, St. Francis of Salles, St. Jerome, and the religious philosophers of Port Royal, and Bossuet and Fenelon. As to his Bible and Virgil, he read and re-read them, and always in Latin, and Sensier says that, " I have never seen a more eloquent translator of these two books." Instead of being an illiterate person, indeed, when he went to Paris, Millet — "the Wild Man of the Woods," as he was called by Delaroche's pupils, among whom he found himself — was already a really cultivated man. His education had been far better than if he had been an ordinary member of a bourgeois, or even of a noble family. Its great characteristics were its thoroughness, its simplicity and refinement, the verycharacteristics that make his own works lovable.

At all opportunities, when his work permitted him, Jean-Fran9ois employed his time in reading. At Cherbourg, where Millet first became the pupil of a matured artist, although he never became the pupil of any artist except in name, we find Millet absorbed in divers sorts of literature. "He read everything," said Sensier, ''from the Almanach Boiteux of Strasbourg to Paul de Kock, from Homer to Beranger: he also read with delight Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Cooper, Goethe's 'Faust,' and the German Ballads." He loved the prose of Victor Hugo; we are told its strong rhythm won him completely; and he was deeply impressed by the great writer's descriptions of the sea, which must again and again have found their echo among his own recollection of his seaside home at La Hague. The books of Walter Scott, it is said, he read again a little later in life, and then he found that the novels of the wizard of the north, except "Red Gauntlet," had for him lost all their savour.

When he went to Paris he turned his attention more to the literature of art. After he left Delaroche's studio he frequently visited the library of Ste. Genevieve, where he studied the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Jean Cousin, and Michael Angelo, the artists in fact who could afford him just the information that he required. But we find him of course most drawn towards anything that referred to Michael Angelo; be it book, or manuscript, every record of the master he studied with avidity.

Fortunate indeed was Millet in his birth, and his bringing up. His parents passed on to him no bourgeois instincts to fight against; no vulgar desires to crop up like weeds again and again in the garden of his mind. The outlook on things in general that he inherited was the outlook of a peasant, simple and dignified, and without any suggestion whatever of unworthy ambitions. Upon this strong basis he was able to nurse the plant of his genius with a surety of success, without fear of any foul growths: from the very outset, in fact. Millet seems to have conducted his career with the full confidence of a man who was building his house upon a rock. This certainty of himself was evident in his dealings with his masters, and evident in his dealings with his fellow-students. It led him sometimes into acts of discourtesy; but these acts occurred mostly in the early part of his life, when an understanding of his fellow-creatures was naturally wanting in him. The pride in himself, of which he at no time failed to be deeply conscious, he announced perhaps too publicly in his youth. But one can understand how it was he became then often mastered by a knowledge of his superiority over those who surrounded him. He knew that he came of a stock that had supported itself without any suspicion of false trading, by taking no advantage of a neighbour's weakness, or failure, or by any of the different opportunities that are sought by the followers of any commercial career. His ancestors he knew had won their bread by wrestling with the elements, as Adam and Eve had done, and were beholden to no man for it; and he knew that

c lo THE BARBIZON SCHOOL he profited by the simple, just Hves of those from whose house he had come. He could review all the mental portraits that he possessed of the little party that had domiciled at Gruchy and find no characteristic that he would have wished away, or even preferred to have been blurred. Millet, too, must have been conscious of the superiority of his own education to that of those with whom he was brought in contact. The wearisome studio, slang, the tedious jokes of the illiterate students at Delaroche's studio, we are told, were irksome to him., "The Wild Man of the Woods" had read too deeply for his fellow-pupils; what was very humorous to themi was without any sparkle to his more cultivated mind.

About his tastes in art we know too that he at no time had any doubts. They were stated distinctly in two drawings that he took with him to Cherbourg, where his father first sought for him a master; and the pictures that he left unfinished, when he died, were conceived on the same lines as those drawings, only they showed a more developed mind, and a more masterly hand. Millet knew that he had within him a force that would in days to come give rise to a Gospel among all lovers of art, and that to the end of his life must be a source of indescribable joy to himself, and there is no wonder that he went about with his head too much in the air; that he, when he first arrived in Paris, made scarcely any friends; that he preferred to wander about picture galleries, to look there at the pictures by ancient masters, with something in them akin to his own thought, and to brood over the satisfaction that was within him.

JEAN-FRANQOIS MILLET n

Deep indeed must have been the satisfaction that Millet always felt within him, and it is for want of an understanding of that inward satisfaction that many have quite unnecessarily, I think, dubbed Millet a martyr. There was no period of his existence at which the artist was not leading his own life. There are those who will point to his return from Cherbourg to the family farm, after the death of Millet pere^ and to the painting of the Boucher pastiches^ and ask if Millet preferred to do these things. With regard to the return to the farm; undoubtedly the act brought with it a certain compensation. Millet was very fond of the Gruchy home; but that fondness, of course, would hardly have taken him away from the practice of his beloved art. It is possible a far more potent influence kept him at Gruchy during that time. Like his namesake, St. Francis, he was not averse to suffering for any object that appealed to his imagination. That his capacity for suffering was as boundless as that of St. Francis, or his ecstacy during the period of endurance so sublime, I do not pretend, but that Millet loved to crucify himself is evident again and again in the course of his career, but especially at the beginning of it. Half the difficulties that beset Millet after his arrival in Paris were of his own making; and some things that he did are entirely mysterious to one without a key to the painter's soul. That key is to be found, I think, in the artist's ecstatic reverence for suffering; in his perpetual reference to it in his letters; in his continual delineation of it in his own pictures. The intense fascination that the idea of a tormented being had for him is conveyed in a description that he wrote of a drawing by Michael Angelo: " But when I saw the drawing of Michel- Angelo which represented a fainting man, it was another thing. The expression of the slackened muscles, the flat surfaces, the lines of this figure all relaxed by physical suffering, affected me. I felt as I if was tormented with him."

There was about Millet undoubtedly the making of a martyr, and there is no knowing to what extent this germ might have been developed had not Millet been surrounded by influences which bound him to life and to accomplish the life's work that had been appointed for him. Each one of these influences is a pleasant matter to dwell upon. No sooner had he left the pleasant haven of his home where all had been ordered for his future well-being, with an almost scientific exactitude, no sooner had he thrown himself upon the broad world of Paris, than there came to him an excellent substitute for the tender care which had surrounded him at Gruchy. Men and women certainly he held aloof from, because those that he at first encountered were not to his liking, but art was waiting for him like a fostering mother, and for a while every need of his was satisfied, as he wandered about amazed and delighted in the beautiful worlds that had been opened out to him by art's chosen apostles.

In time, when the desire and power to create came upon him, came also such sympathizers in his eff'orts as he most needed. Around Millet there appears always to have been a crowd of friends, ministering to him according to their own capabilities, attending to one or other of his wants; some of them remained about him until death put an end to their office. In Paris we find Diaz using all his eloquence, and he was a vehement talker, on Millet's behalf; while Charles Jacque, Dupre, and Barye, and a host of others brought to him friendship, and what to an artist is more necessary than friendship, a sympathy with, if not a complete understanding of the objects of his art.

Many hardships had Millet to endure in Paris, but never had he to endure these alone. Always we read of men flitting in and out of his studio, bringing to him consolation and comradeship, if they could not bring to him money; bringing to him encouragement and understanding of his art if they could not find for him a fresh buyer. Nor did Millet have to go far through life before he found a woman ready to share his fate — a girl of Cherbourg, a Mile. Pauline-Virginie Ono married the painter when he was twenty-seven years of age. Certainly this marriage was not entirely a fortunate one, but ill-health rather than discord was the cause of their unhappiness. Madame Millet was a delicate woman at all times, and was utterly unfitted to live the simple life that Millet was often obliged, but at all times, in accordance with his peasant upbringing, preferred to live. Soon after his wife's death, which happened within four years of his marriage. Millet was fortunate enough to find another woman ready to take her place. Of this second Madame Millet we get no very vivid portrait from any biographer of the painter. Sensier tells us how Millet discovered that she "loved him secretly," and he married her. Of her part in Millet's life as an artist we know little. Edward Wheelwright tells us that she was ''a quiet, reserved woman," and that Millet would often pat her on the back and address her as *'my old woman." We may gather from this that he regarded her with content, that whatever part he had intended her to fulfil in his life that she had fulfilled. We know that Millet must have been fond of children, and she bore him nine. We know that Millet had a keen interest in all sorts of domesticities — hence the subjects of many of his pictures — and she must have been one of the most domestic of women. It is scarcely likely that one who had had the bringing up of a French peasant would feel aggrieved if his wife did not prove to be for him an intellectual companion. That she did, however, take an important part in his artistic career on one occasion we do know. It was to his wife that Millet appealed when it was revealed to him in what light his painting of the nude was regarded by the general public, and without her consent he might never have become Millet, the painter of the country. Millet, the painter of peasant life. How many artists must have read this story of Madame Millet's fidelity with wonder. How many men must have wished that to them also had been granted such numerous and devoted friends. No! Millet's life was not all a gloomy one. It had its dark passages as well as its sunlit ones. But so have all lives.

Taking the bad with the good there still remains a good deal about Millet's life that must fill many a fairly contented man with envy. Above all, it is impossible to pass over his capacity for suffering and his knowledge

JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET i5

of its worth. ''I don't want to stop pain," he wrote to Sensier, ''or find a formula which will make me indifferent or a Stoic. Pain is, perhaps, that which makes an artist express himself most distinctly."

With regard to the Boucher pastiches^ may it not be that a little too much has been made of their levity and the antipathy that the artist must have experienced in their undertaking? Those that I have seen certainly were conceived in an antique spirit — there was a great gulf between them and anything done by Boucher — and could Millet himself have been so shocked by the remarks that he heard before one of his own pictures — on the occasion when he decided to abandon the painting of the nude — if he had ever painted anything with a lewd intention? Millet could never have contemplated the prospect of continually painting "Boucher /a^zf/r^^^," as he himself called them ; but could he not have undertaken them every bit as much with the desire of forwarding his own artistic advancement, as with the hope of making money? About the time of their production he was groping here and there for methods of expression ; and just as certain well-known writers have learnt to write by assuming the style now of one master, now of another, so Millet, before his own style was arrived at, was known to make somewhat similar experiments. The most frivolous part of the Boucher pastiches was undoubtedly their titles — which were provided by his faithful friend, Marolle, who also helped Millet to dispose of these pictures — and that Millet himself gained artistically while making these pastiches he himself admits; he gained in certainty of touch, and made a further escape from the leaden hues which he had been too prone to repeat in some of his earlier work.

During the whole of the time of his stay in Paris, Millet must have been seeking for his metier^ and to have been searching for a method of uttering his thoughts in paint. For the most part he chose during that time just the sort of subjects that were most suitable to his studies; the sort of motives that bound him down by none of the tiresome chains of necessary realism.

The knowledge that he had obtained all that, for him, was obtainablefrom those studies, quite as much as the idle wordsof theloiterers before the picture in theshopwindow, might have made him realize that the time had come to search farther afield for motives which he could treat with a fresh individuality. It is futile to think that Millet could have concerned himself in making this new venture only by the chance utterances of two or three men in the street, when he himself was perfectly capable of gauging the sentiment that these pictures, spoken of so lightly, were able to inspire in the minds of any true lover of art, which he must have known was just the sentiment that had inspired him while producing the pictures. While searching about then for fresh fields for artistic adventures it occurred to him to make use of what was almost his birthright — acomplete understanding of all that pertained to peasant life; all that he had an inborn sympathy with; all that he knew by hard experience and constant observation.

The renunciation of the painting of the nude had its commercial disadvantages, which must have added not a little zest to the idea of his proposed return to country life, and we can understand that when Millet referred in his speech to his wife to the suffering that his search for new subjects must bring to him, there was in his heart a glow which to some people may seem fantastic, but which for all that had nothing about it that was not entirely noble.

At Barbizon we find Millet in raptures over his environment; over his peasant's cottage — he was inclined to be angry with a certain journalist who, many years afterwards, called it a "villa" — and with his barn-like studio. Sensier writes ' * such a studio ! ' ' and dwells coldly upon the limitations of the artist's little house. But many of us have discovered retreats, dear enough to our hearts, which have been described by our friends in terms quite as cold as those applied by Sensier to Millet's little studio and home at Barbizon ; but such friends had little real converse with our inner selves, and had measured our joys by what pleased them, not by what pleased us; our sufferings, by what troubled them, and not by what was likely to trouble us; and one often wonders whether Sensier, although he must have said to Millet many things that were comforting about his art, ever came within a measurable distance of comprehending the various parts that went to make up Millet the man.