It is quite the custom to paint the life of Millet at Barbizon as one of misery and black unrest; but those who do this are the people who read pain into his pictures:  they do not comprehend the simplicity and sublimity and quiet joy that were possible in this man’s nature, and in the nature of the people he pictured.

From the time he reached Barbizon there came into his work a largeness, a majesty and an elevation that is unique in the history of art.  Millet’s heart went out to humanity—­the humanity that springs from the soil, lives out its day, and returns to earth.  His pictures form an epic of country life, as he tells of its pains, its anxieties, its privations—­yes, of its peace and abiding faith, and the joy and health and strength that comes to those who live near to Nature’s heart.

Walt Whitman catalogues the workers and toilers, and lists their occupations in pages that will live; Millet shows us wood-gatherers, charcoal-burners, shepherds, gleaners, washerwomen, diggers, quarrymen, road laborers, men at the plow, and women at the loom.  Then he shows the noon-hour, the moments of devotion, the joys of motherhood, the silent pride of the father, the love of brother and sister and of husband and wife.  And again in the dusk of a winter night we see black-lined against the sky the bent figure of an old woman, bearing her burden of fagots; and again we are shown the plain, homely interior of a cottage where the family watches by the bedside of a dying child.

And always the picture is not quite complete—­the faces are never distinct—­no expression of feature is there, but the soul worked up into the canvas conveys its silent message to all those who have eyes to see and hearts to feel.

Only a love and sympathy as wide as the world could have produced the “Gleaners,” the “Sower” and the “Angelus.”

Millet was what he was on account of what he had endured.  All art is at last autobiography.

The laborer’s cottage that he took at Barbizon had but three small, low rooms.  These served as studio, kitchen and bedchamber.  When the family had increased to eleven, other rooms were added, and the studio was transferred to the barn, there at the end of the garden.

Millet had two occupations, and two recreations, he once said.  In the mornings he worked in his garden, digging, sowing, planting, reaping.  In the afternoons he painted—­painted until the sun got too low to afford the necessary light; then he went for his daily solitary walk through the woods and fields, coming back at dark.  After supper he helped his wife with the housework, put the children to bed, and then sat and read until the clock struck midnight.

This was his simple life.  Very slowly, recognition came that way.  Theodore Rousseau, himself a great artist, and a man too great for jealousy, spread his fame, and the faithful Sensier in Paris lost no opportunity to aid his friend by the use of a commercial shrewdness in which Millet was woefully lacking.