against a wall, his head raised, his hat in his hand and his hair pushed back, his feet shod with heavy wooden shoes, compares him to "a peasant chief about to be shot." To the end he violently proclaimed his country origin as opposed to Paris. "I will never be made to bow. I will never have the art of Parisian drawing-rooms forced upon me. A peasant I was born, a peasant I will die. I will stay on my own soil without yielding so much as the breadth of a wooden shoe."
Finally, before beginning to study the life and work of Millet, I have to make one observation which especially concerns an English public. It is that this great peasant painter, the faithful representative in contemporary art of the French people, is by his temperament and his Biblical spirit more akin to the intellectual oligarchy of England or America than to that of France. Indeed it was by American and English people (as we shall see) that he was earliest understood; among them that he immediately found his first purchasers and his first pupils; and it is in their countries, I am convinced, that moral comprehension and love of his work will remain
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