neyard: cutting the
wheat, gathering in the grapes, and treading out the wine, and, in
the later season, dressing 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
Duerer was especially given 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 gathering 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 only 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