Print collector's quarterly (4.1914)

joyed depicting the vigorous little limbs and figure of
his grandchild. The baby’s arms and hands are held
back under a sort of napkin tied round the waist, pre-
venting their interference with the transfer of a
spoonful of IjouilUe—which the young mother is cool-
ing by blowing upon it—to the pouting and expectant
mouth.
Millet’s painting of The Gleaners, presented to the
Museum of the Louvre in 1889 by Mme. Pommery,
shares with The Angelus and The Sower the highest
place in the estimation of many who delight in com-
paring and classifying the artist’s works; and this
appreciation is justified by the beauty of the subject,
the strength of its composition, and its solid execu-
tion. His final conception of the subject was the cul-
mination of many studies that, commencing with a
single figure bencling to pick up an ear of wheat, grew
into two and at last to the three women grouped as we
see them in the painting mentioned and in the well-
known etching. The drawing which the Museum pos-
sesses represents one of the stages in this progression;
and while the general form of the grouping corre-
sponds to that of the Louvre picture and etching,
there are certain differences of detail. The shape, too,
is “upright” in the drawing in order to give place for
the monumental Stacks that are being built in the
background, contrasting their opulent growth with
the rarity of the stray ears of wheat the women are
gathering near by. Millet made a cabinet-sized paint-
ing of this form of the subject, but in the larger
work first shown in the Salon of 1857, besides altering
the shape to a more horizontal form, he placed the
Stacks and other details much farther back, so that

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