MILLET’S EPIC OF LABOUR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 72, Issue 291, 7 December 1929, Page 18 (Supplement)

MILLET’S EPIC OF LABOUR

No other subject in the world was to Millet more full of interest and value than the life of the fields—the land labourer by his skill and strength securing from nature thc fruits of the earth. Why should not such a calling be celebrated in painting just as it had been in verse by some of thc great poets ef thc world? He did not hesitate befor e thc task because few other painters had previously regarded the actual country labourer as a subject for art, but on 100 King round the galleries at the fantastic depictions of country life, he felt, impatience with the artificiality that portrayed dainty, silk-skirted, high-heeled shepherdesses •hatting with or being serenaded by Dresden China shepherds with knots of blue ribbon at the knees of their silk stockings. It was always a favourite idea with him that every painter ought to have a central thought—uno pensee. mere, or mother thought, as the French say —that he feels with all the strength of his heart and tries to stamp on the hearts of others. And gradually there rose from this central thought of Millett’s regarding country life, what has been called his great epic of labour, as he grew to realise that it was his mission to illustrate, “himself a peasant of peasants, the whole cycle of the life of rhe fields in a series of immortal pictures.” . . .

MilleX’s devotion to the workaday life at home was a genuine matter, and it was with joy he felt himself a peasant again as he lent a hand in reaping corn, binding sheaves, and sharing th e midday bread . . . with thc field workers, saying, as he shovelled mortar and plaster in helping to build a wall, that if he were not an artist he would be a mason. It was always actually painful to him to see work done in an awkward or careless manner, and long afterwards his son would tell how he remembered seeing his father stop in a field to rebind a clumsily tied sheaf while pointing out to the harvester how it should be done. He loved also to watch the action of digging, and to tell how a good workman would economise his strength, so handling his spade as to exert the right amount of strength required for the matter in hand, neither mor<s nor less. —From “Jean Francois Millet,” by Mrs Leslie Thomson.