KURTZ MILLET ABOUT FORTY YEARS OF AGE. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN HIS GARDEN.) further information in regard to an order he had received from M. de Chennevières, the Minister of Fine Arts, for the decoration of one of the chapels of the Pantheon, and to see the chapel in which the paintings were to be placed. I went with François and found him with Madame Millet eating their lunch at the Duval restaurant in the Rue Montesquieu. Millet was cutting his bread with his knife like a peasant, and good-humoredly complained of having to come to Paris. He showed me the written order from the minister and granted my request to be permitted to find his address. He seemed much pleased in having been chosen for this work, and with the subject assigned him. His mood was more light and gay than I had known him to possess. We then went to the Palais Royal and took coffee out-of-doors. Millet was full of reminiscences of his early life in Paris. He told me how a dealer would come to him for a picture. Having nothing painted, he would offer the dealer a book and ask him to wait for a little while that he might add a few touches to a picture. He would then go into his studio and take a fresh canvas or a panel and in two hours bring out a little nude figure, which he had painted during that time, and for which he would receive twenty or twenty-five francs. We have in later days seen these pictures sold for as many thousands. Millet did not live to know anything of the large prices which are now familiar to us. It was only a few years before his death that the "Angelus" exchanged hands for $10,000. This seemed to him enormous, and he spoke of it to a friend in an apologetic tone, assuring him that he had nothing to do with the transaction. If my memory serves me rightly, he was getting about five thousand francs for the larger and more important pictures upon which he was working during the last years of his life, and at that time he was dependent upon advances upon incompleted work. This was probably owing to the fact that as he was able to command larger prices he lingered more over his work, always striving for greater simplicity, force of expression, depth of color, for greater perfection in finish, which the small prices of earlier days would not permit. I knew Millet to have had very flattering offers from dealers, who wished to place unlimited sums at his disposal provided he would work for them. He refused all offers, preferring to continue his more independent existence. I returned again to Barbizon for the summer of 1874. This was Millet's last. How far I was from knowing that I was spending with him his last well evenings! I knew that his health was not good and that he did not go for long walks as in former years, but I thought his illness some chronic disease that would not shorten his life. I never heard his illness referred to further than that he would sometimes complain of indigestion and ask for orangeflower water. Once, late in the summer, he lightly spoke of his lack of energy, and said that he would sit and dig with his brush at the dry paint on his palette rather than go to his table for fresh colors. At this time I found Millet deeply occupied with the compositions for the "History of Saint Geneviève." In all his leisure moments he was preoccupied with this work. I would call after dinner to take coffee with François or to go with him for a walk and would find the father sitting alone at the table, first staring at the cloth, then passing his finger over the surface before him as if drawing, holding his open hands on either side of the place where he had been making indications, and looking as at a completed sketch; then perhaps he would make the movement of obliterating it with his hand, and seeming to dismiss it from his mind he would then recommence his invisible markings. Millet explained his preoccupation, and would always ask me to excuse his silence. This was generally in the yard or garden, between the house and the studio, where the family dined during the pleasant summer evenings. In talking of the decorations, Millet referred to the difficulties of the composition. The lighting of the chapel was so dim that he wished to make the figures tell in silhouette either in light against dark, or in dark against light. He thought it the work of the historical painter to make the story so plain and complete that it would be told by the paintings without previous knowledge or the aid of books. The sketches for this series that Millet left were very slight. I saw several of them, only a few outlines in charcoal on small canvases, the movement of the figures indicated with long sweeping strokes. Thus was the master taken away while making preparations for that which, in a certain sense, would have been the most important work of his life. During this summer and autumn I spent many evenings with Millet in playing dominoes. He was very fond of the game, and as his eyes would not permit him to draw or read by lamplight, this was his only means of diversion. Although I did my best, Millet was generally the winner, and he would indulge in much hilarity over my misfortunes. I have always regretted my excessive delicacy in not asking for a sketch which he made on the tallying sheet on which I had been marked the loser in every game. It was a figure stretched upon a tomb, and labeled my effigy. Frequently some of the family were in Paris and would be expected home by the late omnibus; on these evenings we generally kept at the game until its arrival at half-past twelve or one o'clock. I would rarely talk of art matters, unless the subject was started by Millet, and this was not often. Had I been less youthful and inexperienced how many valuable opinions might I have obtained from this great mind. On the other hand, without this youth and inexperience, Millet might have been more reserved with me. I once ventured to ask him his opinion of Japanese pictures. He did not express that absolute admiration which I expected. I then asked him if he did not think them superior to the work of the fashionable Parisian painter. He replied, "Most decidedly; but their work is far from the beauty of Fra Angelico." I more frequently talked to Millet of himself, and he always answered my questions very freely: in conversation, as in painting, he had practiced the art, you might say, of formulating his ideas in the most concise language,-waiting to arrange his sentences before speaking. This peculiarity was probably accentuated in conversation with me, as my knowledge of French was imperfect, and Millet was always anxious MILLET'S STUDIO. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY KARL BODMER MADE SEVERAL YEARS AFTER MILLET'S DEATH, GIVING A PARTIAL ASPECT OF THE STUDIO AS IT WAS WHEN OCCUPIED BY MILLET.) THE SOWER. 1 ENGRAVED BY T. COLE, AFTER AN AUTOTYPE BY AD. BRAUN, FROM THE PAINTING NOW IN lest he should use a term that I would not I once said to him that he must have a remarkable memory to be able to work, as was his wont, without nature before him. He replied that in that sense he had not, but that which touched his heart he retained. In regard to working from nature Millet once said to me, "I can say I have never painted (or worked) from nature"; and gave 1 Reprinted from the issue of this magazine for November, 1880. as his reason, "nature does not pose." I would like this to be clearly understood; Millet had well weighed his words in stating that he had never worked from nature. This was without reference to his student days, when he drew and painted like others from the model; but from the beginning of his production of pictures he seems to have recognized the fact that "nature does not pose." Always looking upon her as animate,-moving, and living, he recorded by the most simple means the stable facts observed during nature's transitions. With the exception of several painted studies of his parental home, and of other places dear to his childhood memories, which were in fact pictures in every sense, well composed and effective in light and shade, drawn probably from nature, but painted more from memory, I have never seen any work from nature of Millet's that was not memorandum-like in character, indicating by outline and shadow the principal contour; accenting here and there a prominent or important muscle, or some particular form which he would find to be the key to the expression of the form or action which he sought. Almost all other painters have left us studies elaborately wrought out either in color or in chalk, surpassing even in detail and research the parts in the picture for which these studies were used. Upon my first visit to Millet he took from his pocket a sketch-book about two and a half The other qualities of the landscape were too fleeting. He had copied all that would pose for him, as with the ricks; his memory and knowledge supplied the rest. Again I have authority for stating that Millet was not indifferent to or incapable of working from nature, or of applying it to his pictures in progress. His son has frequently told me of his desire to make more studies from the living model, and his regret at not being able to do so. It seemed to be difficult for Millet to approach people that he wanted to have pose for him, and this office of asking a peasant man or woman to sit for him always fell upon his wife. But these sittings were never long nor tiresome; he wanted only the few facts of form or color which that particular model could give him. For a detail or a special quality he would at times take the greatest pains. Madame Millet has told me by three and a half inches in size, and showed me upon one of these little pages his study for the wheat-ricks which were the principal objects in his picture called "Winter." This sketch, like many others of the same character, was a masterpiece; every line was vital, the sinking and bulging of the ricks showing the effect of storm and weather. But the absolute modeling in light and shade, the texture of the straw, etc., was not attempted. This the artist supplied in his painting-not by more elaborate drawings or studies in color, but by his knowledge and memory, and by the observation of other wheat-ricks under similar effects as those represented in his picture. Some of his landscape studies in outline with pen and ink were the exact record of proportion and construction, resembling rather the work of a topographical engineer. of having worn the roughest of peasant dresses about the house and garden for weeks, that when it pleased him her husband might call upon her to pose for some part of a picture upon which he would be at work, and of Millet compelling her to wear the same shirt for an uncomfortably long time; not to paint the dirt, as the early critics of Millet would have us believe, but that the rough linen should simplify its folds and take the form of the body, that he might give a fresher and stronger accent to those qualities he so loved-the garment becoming, as it were, a part of the body, and expressing, as he has said, even more than the nude, the larger and more simple forms of nature. A memorable evening was one spent in the discussion of the beautiful in art. Before Millet had left the dining-table, I think, I asked him to decide a point which was giving me much THE OGRE. perplexity. I was painting a road on the plain running off to another village. (The country on the outside of villages and towns in this part of France is entirely without hedges or fences of any kind.) In the foreground I had brought in a wall to express that this was the beginning of a village. An artist friend had advised me to take this out, as it destroyed the "beauty" of the picture. My friend's criticism was probably a good one; his meaning was that the chief attraction in the picture lay in the simplicity and expanse of the plain. The wall in the foreground, not being an object of interest, detracted from the real interest of the picture, the fields and the wide horizon. But I clung to my desire to express with the wall the entrance to a village. I began telling this to Millet, but got no further than my friend's opinion, that the wall destroyed the beauty of the picture. This worked Millet up to an extreme degree; I might say it put him into a towering rage. The criticism he took as an expression of the prevalent idea of the beautiful, which he could not listen to with calmness. To him beauty was the fit, the appropriate, the serviceable, the character well rendered, an idea well wrought out, "with largeness and simplicity." This last Millet would put in at times, as if in parenthesis. I often thought of it as the weak point in his argument. This was his bias; he could not separate beauty from grandeur: but I listened and did not argue; in fact, there was no chance. Millet went from one illustration to another. Of my picture he said that if I had not composed it in a way that would express my thought, it was a failure. "The artist's first task is to find an arrangement (or composition) that will give a full and striking expression to his idea." Seeming to find words inadequate, he took the lamp and went over to his studio, bringing back photographs from the frescos of Giotto. As he showed me these treasures, each one was a fresh triumph. "Had he not told me so," his manner seemed to say; "was not character beauty? Was not that which fitted its place beautiful? Was not the naturalness of that action beautiful, although it was only one man washing the feet of another?" He then took me into his bedroom and showed me, hanging on the wall, an engraving of a "Nativity" by Titian. He criticised in this the accessories as |