nd this painter of "rustic genre"
is the world's greatest master of the sublime after Michelangelo.

[Illustration: Plate 4.--Millet. "The Spaders."]

The comparison with Michelangelo is inevitable and has been made again
and again by those who have felt the elemental grandeur of Millet's
work. As a recent writer has remarked: "An art highly intellectualized,
so as to convey a great idea with the lucidity of language, must needs
be controlled by genius akin to that which inspired the ceiling
paintings of the Sistine Chapel."[A] This was written of the Trajanic
sculptors, whose works both Michelangelo and Millet studied and admired,
and indeed it is to this old Roman art, or to the still older art of
Greece, that one must go for the truest parallel of Millet's temper and
his manner of working. He was less impatient, less romantic and
emotional than Michelangelo; he was graver, quieter, more serene; and if
he had little of the Greek sensuousness and the Greek love of physical
beauty, he had much of the antique clarity and simplicity. To express
his idea clearly, logically, and forcibly; to make a work of art that
should be "all of a piece" and in which "things should be where they
are for a purpose"; to admit nothing for display, for ornament, even for
beauty, that did not necessarily and inevitably grow out of his central
theme, and to suppress with an iron rigidity everything useless or
superfluous--this was his constant and conscious effort. It is an ideal
eminently austere and intellectual--an ideal, above all, especially and
eternally classic.

[A] Eugenie Strong, "Roman Sculpture," p. 224.

Take, for an instance, the earliest of his masterpieces, the first great
picture by which he marked his emancipation and his determination
henceforth to produce art as he understood it without regard to the
preferences of others. Many of his preliminary drawings and studies
exist and we can trace, more or less clearly, the process by which the
final result was arrived at. At first we have merely a peasant sowing
grain; an everyday incident, truly enough observed but nothing more.
Gradually the background is cut down, the space restricted, the figure
enlarged until it fills its frame as a metope of the Parthenon is
filled. The gesture is ever enlarged and given more sweep and majesty,
the silhouette is simplified and divested of all accidental or
insignificant detail. A thousand previous observations are compared and
resumed i