About the middle of the century there emerged from the older schools two
others which may be called the Realist and Idealist, and indeed there
were those to whom both these terms could be applied, both methods being
united in their remarkable works. Of the Realists Corot and Courbet are
distinguished, as were Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau among the
Idealists.

Millet, with his marvellous power of observation, painted his landscapes
with the fidelity of his school in that art, and so keenly realized the
religious element in the peasant life about him--the poetry of these
people--that he portrayed his figures in a manner quite his own--at the
same time realistic and full of idealism. MacColl in his
"Nineteenth-Century Art" called Millet "the most religious figure in
modern art after Rembrandt," and adds that "he discovered a patience of
beauty, a reconciling, in the concert of landscape mystery with labor."

Shall we call Bastien Lepage a follower of Millet, or say that in these
men there was a unity of spirit; that while they realized the poetry of
their subjects intensely, they fully estimated the reality as well?

The "Joan of Arc" is a phenomenal example of this art. The landscape is
carefully realistic, and like that in which a French peasant girl of any
period would live. But here realism ceases and the peasant girl becomes a
supremely exalted being, entranced by a vision of herself in full armor.

This art, at once realistic and idealistic, is an achievement of the
nineteenth century--so clear and straightforward in its methods as to
explain itself far better than words can explain it.