the window seat in our picture.

Ruskin tells us that a true artist feels like a caged bird in painting
any enclosed space, unless it contains some opening like a door or
window. No amount of beauty will content us, he says, if we are shut
in to that alone. Our picture is a good proof of this principle. We
can easily fancy how different the effect would be without the window:
the room would appear almost like a prisoner's cell. As it is, the
great window suggests the out-of-door world into which it opens, and
gives us a sense of larger space.

Our illustration is taken from a drawing. Millet was a painstaking
artist who made many drawings and studies for his paintings. This is
probably such a study, as there is also a painting by him of the same
subject very similar to this.




III

THE POTATO PLANTERS


In the picture called The Potato Planters we are reminded at once
of the peasants we have already seen in Going to Work. We see here
married people a few years older than the young people of the other
picture working together in the fields.

It may be that this is their own little plot of ground, for they work