JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET 268 The whole building, with the rich treasures which he presented to his fatherland, will be his monument ; his works are to be placed in the rooms of the square building that surrounds the open court-yard, and which, both internally and ex- ternally, are painted in the Pompeian style. His arrival in the roads of Copen« hagen and landing at the custom-house form the subjects depicted in the com- partments under the windows of one side of the museum. Through centuries to come will nations wander to Denmark ; not allured by our charming green isl- ands, with their fresh beech-woods alone — no, but to see these works and this comb. There is, however, one place more that the stranger will visit, the little spot at Nysoe where his atelier stands, and where the tree bends its branches over the canal to the solitary swan which he fed. The name of Thorwaldsen will be re- membered in England by his statues of Jason and Byron ; in Switzerland, by his "recumbent lion ;" in Roeskilde, by his figure of Christian the Fourth. It will live in every breast in which a love of art is enkindled. JEAN-FRANQOIS MILLET By Clarence Cook (1814-1875) w e read that on one occasion, when a picture by some Dutch artist, repre- senting peasants at their sports, was shown to Louis XIV., he angrily exclaimed, " Take away those vermin ! " Such sub- jects had never been chosen by French artists, nor indeed had they been seen any- where in Europe before the Dutch artists began to paint them in the seventeenth cen- tury. The Italian painters of the early and the later Renaissance, working almost ex- clusively for the churches, or for the pal- aces of pleasure-loving princes, did not consider the peasant or the laboring man. by himself, a proper subject for his art. If he were introduced at any time into picture or bas-relief, it was only as a necessary actor in some religious story, such as " The Adoration of the Shepherds," or in the representations of the months or the seasons, as in the Fountain of the Public Square at Perugia, where we see the peasant engaged in the labors of the farm or vineyard : cutting the wheat, gathering in the grapes, and treading out the wine, and, in the later season, dress- " Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.
