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Slide Peasants Going to Work Millet

MMA

No country equaled France in either quantity or quality of graphic expression in the 19th century. [In england there was a charming & able landscape school, with a rather settled air. The Pre-Raphaelites & William Morris were trying to save the arts from the mangle of the machine age, but there was something too eclectic, too lacking in robustness, to make this a charge rather than a retreat.]

In France the intensity of the situation may well have increased the vitality of expression. Too, in France the preoccupation with the peasant as subject matter does not always seem so much a rural retreat as an attempt to make a statement for something with a quality that should be appreciated & for a way of life that might be bettered.

Millet has been sentimentalised over a great deal too much, in his own time & ever since. Camille Pissarro in a letter to his son Lucien writes that at a Millet exhibition he ran into Hyacinthe Pozier who was in tears; Pissarro thought someone in his family had died, but "Not at all, it was the Angelus, Millet's painting which had provoked his emotion. [This canvas, one of the painter's poorest, a canvas for which in these times 500,000 francs were refused, has just this moral effect on the vulgarians who crowd around it:] they trample one another before it...These people do not realise that certain of Millet's drawings are a hundred times better than his paintings which are now dated...Millet's whole value is in his drawings, which however are infected with a sentimentality that will one day embarrass all true artists."

Millet's etching & lithographs reproduce with expertness the virtues & vices of these drawings. Himself a peasant, he said peasant subject matter 

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final word completed per Smithsonian instructions