tudy of nature and applied to
peasant life. He was peasant born, living and dying at Barbizon,
sympathizing with his class, and painting them with great poetic force
and simplicity. His sentiment sometimes has a literary bias, as in his
far-famed but indifferent Angelus, but usually it is strictly
pictorial and has to do with the beauty of light, air, color, motion,
life, as shown in The Sower or The Gleaners. Technically he was not
strong as a draughtsman or a brushman, but he had a large feeling for
form, great simplicity in line, keen perception of the relations of
light and dark, and at times an excellent color-sense. He was
virtually the discoverer of the peasant as an art subject, and for
this, as for his original point of view and artistic feeling, he is
ranked as one of the foremost artists of the century.

Jules Breton (1827-), though painting little besides the peasantry, is
no Millet follower, for he started painting peasant scenes at about
the same time as Millet. His affinities were with the New-Greeks early
in life, and ever since he has inclined toward the academic in style,
though handling the rustic subject. He is a good technician, except in
his late work; but as an original thinker, as a pictorial poet, he
does not show the intensity or profundity of Millet. The followers of
the Millet-Breton tradition are many. The blue-frocked and sabot-shod
peasantry have appeared in salon and gallery for twenty years and
more, but with not very good results. The imitators, as usual, have
caught at the subject and missed the spirit. Billet and Legros,
contemporaries of Millet, still living, and Lerolle, a man of
present-day note, are perhaps the most considerable of the painters of
rural subjects to-day.

THE SEMI-CLASSICISTS: It must not be inferred that the classic
influence of David and Ingres disappeared from view with the coming of
the romanticists, the Fontainebleau landscapists, and the Barbizon
painters. On the contrary, side by side with these men, and opposed
to them, were the believers in line and academic formulas of the
beautiful. The whole tendency of academic art in France was against
Delacroix, Rousseau, and Millet. During their lives they were regarded
as heretics in art and without the pale of the Academy. Their art,
however, combined with nature study and the realism of Courbet,
succeeded in modifying the severe classicism of Ingres into what has
been called semi-classicism. It consists in the