sing, and many other
artists were active in this movement, while in America, Innes, A. H.
Wyant, and Homer Martin, with numerous followers, were raising landscape
art to an eminence before unknown.

Formerly landscapes had been used as backgrounds, oftentimes attractive
and beautiful, while the real purpose of the pictures centred in the
human figures. The distinctive feature of nineteenth-century landscape is
the representation of Nature alone, and the variety of method used and
the differing aims of the artists cover the entire gamut between absolute
Realism and the most pronounced Impressionism.

* * * * *

About the middle of the century there emerged from the older schools two
others which may be called the Realist and Idealist, and indeed there
were those to whom both these terms could be applied, both methods being
united in their remarkable works. Of the Realists Corot and Courbet are
distinguished, as were Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau among the
Idealists.

Millet, with his marvellous power of observation, painted his landscapes
with the fidelity of his school in that art, and so keenly realized the
religious element in the peasant life about him--the poetry of these
people--that he portrayed his figures in a manner quite his own--at the
same time realistic and full of idealism. MacColl in his
"Nineteenth-Century Art" called Millet "the most religious figure in
modern art after Rembrandt," and adds that "he discovered a patience of
beauty, a reconciling, in the concert of landscape mystery with labor."

Shall we call Bastien Lepage a follower of Millet, or say that in these
men there was a unity of spirit; that while they realized the poetry of
their subjects intensely, they fully estimated the reality as well?

The "Joan of Arc" is a phenomenal example of this art. The landscape is
carefully realistic, and like that in which a French peasant girl of any
period would live. But here realism ceases and the peasant girl becomes a
supremely exalted being, entranced by a vision of herself in full armor.

This art, at once realistic and idealistic, is an achievement of the
nineteenth century--so clear and straightforward in its methods as to
explain itself far better than words can explain it.

* * * * *

Contemporary with these last-named artists were the Pre-raphaelites. The
centre of this school was called the Brotherhood, which was fou