JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
slowly brought to life." Huysmans justly remarks that it is as a painter of the Earth that Millet is especially distinguished. "Brute matter, the earth rises out of the framework, alive and exuberant. We feel it thick and heavy; through its clods and grasses, we feel it running deep and full. We breathe the scent of it, we could crumble it between our fingers. In most landscape painters the soil is superficial; in Millet it is deep." "Generally," said Burty, "the clods of earth and plots of grass come to the edge of the frame, their massing and drawing are exact, their values observed with knowledge, not predominating but giving a logical and solid groundwork to the various planes unfolded one beyond another until they merge into the sky amid the mists of the horizon." Let us recall the foregrounds of The Angelus and of The Sower, with their solidity, their living truth; and the immense plains stretching to the distance bathed in light and fading at the horizon into a fine haze. "The sky recedes beyond our sight, the fields are bathed in air." "Every landscape," said Millet to Wheelwright, "however small it may be, ought to suggest
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