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 of the day. But if too much has been made of Millet's
peasant origin, perhaps hardly enough has been made of his race. It is
at least interesting that the two Frenchmen whose art has most in
common with his, Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Corneille, should have been
Normans like himself. In the severely restrained, grandly simple,
profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed,
strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found its artistic
expression.

For Millet is neither a revolutionary nor a sentimentalist, nor even a
romanticist; he is essentially a classicist of the classicists, a
conservative of the conservatives, the one modern exemplar of the grand