He did all kinds of work in these days, even painting signs and illustrating sheet music, and it was all capital practice for a young man, but it was not what he wanted to do.  A great deal has been made of the story of his overhearing some one speak of him as “a fellow who never paints anything but naked women,” and he is represented as undergoing something like a sudden conversion and as resolving to “do no more of the devil’s work.”  As a matter of fact, he had, from the first, wanted to paint “men at work in the fields,” with their “fine attitudes,” and he only tried his hand at other things because he had his living to earn.  Sensier saw what seems to have been the first sketch for “The Sower” as early as 1847, and it existed long before that, while “The Winnower” was exhibited in 1848; and the overheard conversation is said to have taken place in 1849.  There was nothing indecent or immoral in Millet’s early work, and the best proof that he felt no moral reprobation for the painting of the nude—­as what true painter, especially in France, ever did?—­is that he returned to it in the height of his power and, in the picture of the little “Goose Girl” (Pl. 1) by the brook side, her slim, young body bared for the bath, produced the loveliest of his works.  No, what happened to Millet in 1849 was simply that he resolved to do no more pot-boiling, to consult no one’s taste but his own, to paint what he pleased and as he pleased, if he starved for it.  He went to Barbizon for a summer’s holiday and to escape the cholera.  He stayed there because living was cheap and the place was healthful, and because he could find there the models and the subjects on which he built his highly abstract and ideal art.

[Illustration:  Plate 3.—­Millet.  “The Gleaners.”  In the Louvre.]

At Barbizon he neither resumed the costume nor led the life of a peasant.  He wore sabots, as hundreds of other artists have done, before and since, when living in the country in France.  Sabots are very cheap and very dry and not uncomfortable when you have acquired the knack of wearing them.  In other respects he dressed and lived like a small bourgeois, and was monsieur to the people about him.  Barbizon was already a summer resort for artists before he came there, and the inn was full of painters; while others, of whom Rousseau was one, were settled there more or less permanently.  It is but a short distance from Paris, and the exhibitions and museums were readily accessible.  The life that Millet lived there was that of many poor, self-respecting, hard-working artists, and if he had been a landscape painter that life would never have seemed in any way exceptional.  It is only because he was a painter of the figure that it seems odd he should have lived in the country; only because he painted peasants that he has been thought of as a peasant himself.  If he accepted the name, with a kind of pride, it was in protest against the frivolity and artificiality of the fashionable art