step made necessary by his task, over the downs that top the
high cliffs, followed by a cloud of crows that pounce upon the grain
as he sows it. At first sight there would seem to be nothing in this
picture to call for particular notice; but the public, the artists,
the critics, were with one accord strongly drawn to it. Something in
the picture appealed to feelings deeper than mere curiosity, and an
interest was excited such as did not naturally belong to a picture of
a man sowing a field of grain. The secret was this: that a man born
and bred in the midst of laboring people, struggling with the hard
necessities of life--himself a laborer, and one who knew by experience
all the lights and shades of the laborer's life--had painted this
picture out of his own deep sympathy with his fellows, and to please
himself by reproducing the most significant and poetical act in the
life of the farmer.

The painter of this picture, the first man of our time to give the
laborer in the fields and on the farm a place in art, and to set
people to thinking about him, as a man, not merely as an illustration
of some sacred text, or an image in a book of allegories, was
Jean-Francois Millet, known as the peasant painter of peasants.

He was born at Gruchy, a small hamlet on the coast of Normandy, where
his family, well known in the region for several generations, lived by
the labor of their hands, cultivating their fields and exercising the
simple virtues of that pastoral life, without ambition and without
desire for change. This content was a part of the religion of the
country and must not be looked upon as arguing a low state of
intelligence or of manners. Of their neighbors we have no account, but
the Millet household contained many of the elements that go to sustain
the intellectual no less than the spiritual life. If there was plain
living, there was high thinking; there were books and of the best, and
more than one member of the circle valued learning for its own sake.
Millet owed much to his grandmother, a woman of great strength of
character and of a deeply religious nature. As his godmother she gave
him his name, calling him Jean, after his father, and Francois, after
Saint Francis of Assisi. As is usual in Catholic countries, the boy
was called after the name of his patron saint, and in the case of
Millet, Saint Francis, the ardent lover of nature, the friend of the
birds and of all the animate creation, was well chosen as the