International studio (34.1908)

The Scrip


Property oj the Metropolitan Museum oj Art By Permission,
SUMMER LANDSCAPE BY DUPRE

be shown as succumbing under a mental weight.
The modern worker is frail and his labors point
toward disease and death, whereas the worker
shown by Millet is the hero of the Psalmist—the
strong man who rejoiceth to run a race.
It is peculiarly appropriate to interrogate Millet’s
art for the intellectual and moral idea underlying
the execution, since it was an art of expression in
the most complete sense of the word. Every line
that he drew was a symbol, and stood for an idea or
an emotion, not in the superficial fashion of art that
is symbolic because it can be so little else, but be-
cause everything that he saw represented life and
meaning to him. We have only to read his letters
to see how he regarded his subjects. When he
painted the woman drawing water he wanted even
the well to tell its story of how many generations
had come to it on a like errand, in the Woman
Feeding Chickens he tried to give the idea of “a
nest of birds being fed by their mother,” and in his
description of the picture he adds “the man in the
background works to feed his young.” Elsewhere
he speaks about painting a “very simple sunset,” to
which, nevertheless, he is attempting to give a look
of sadness. All things visible spoke to him in their
own language because he was a poet, and yet be-
cause he was also a painter, written descriptions of
visible things became pictures in his mind; thus,
when he read Theocritus he saw the vineyards and
the foxes, not as the translator saw them, but as
they were to the living eye.

With Corot, who, is next to Millet in popularity,
perhaps, and ahead of him in the estimation of
many amateurs of art, the world that lies before us
in a dream loses its intense emotional significance
and at the same time something of its tangibility.
To Corot, Millet’s attitude was not entirely compre-
hensible. He found his pictures “too new” for
him. “When I look at them,” he said, “I do not
know where I am. I am too fond of the old.” Yet
in certain respects Corot’s painting strikes a more
modern note than Millet’s. If we have just found
modern art individualistic and particular, we must
now face the other way about and find it impersonal
and abstract. It is that also. We have few paint-
ers and fewer sculptors who can do as Millet did,
invest a strong personal emotion with a noble
serenity that robs it of all poignancy and causes it
to bring peace to the mind, even while it represents
effort and stress. We seem to have separated the
qualities of serenity and emotion in our visions
of humanity. When we attempt to represent
equanimity and the peace-bringing quality in life
and nature we turn almost invariably to land-
scape. Here it is our present taste to eschew
the dramatic and strongly emotional and to paint
rather plain and straightforward portraits of land-
scapes, or if the mood of the painter is allowed
to appear, it is a mood as far removed as possible
from the introspective. Corot’s mood, which in his
later pictures, after he joined the Barbizon men,
was essentially the same, has this quality of blithe

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