JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
him more frequently to represent the dark hours of the woods, and the poetry of shadow. But he mistrusted these too easy effects; he was afraid of sentimentality and might well have said, as Michael Angelo did to Francis of Holland: "good painting will never draw a tear." He particularly delighted in the first and last hours of the day, when the light falls level upon the upturned furrows as in The Angelus and when the distances are bathed in a fine powdery light, as in some of his Shepherds and Shepherdesses. And in spite of all this it cannot be said that he is a painter of half-tones. That term conveys an implication of softness and moderation that ill accord with the rather rough energy of his genius. To conclude, though he well knew how to express the soft glow of a warm light as he did in Gréville Church, in the Louvre, or the dramatic contrast between an opaque black sky full of storm and clear sunshine upon meadows and flowery orchards as he did in Spring in the same gallery, yet he was never, properly speaking, a great painter of light, still less a great colourist. He has been justly reproached with too often painting earth, flesh and stuffs all "with the
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