eternal poem of the healthy human form.

[Illustration: Plate 7.--Millet. "The New-Born Calf."
In the Art Institute, Chicago.]

The especial study of the nineteenth century was landscape, and Millet
was so far a man of his time that he was a great landscape painter; but
his treatment of landscape was unlike any other, and, like his own
treatment of the figure, in its insistence on essentials, its
elimination of the accidental, its austere and grand simplicity. I have
heard, somewhere, a story of his saying, in answer to praise of his work
or inquiry as to his meaning: "I was trying to express the difference
between the things that lie flat and the things that stand upright."
That is the real motive of one of his masterpieces--one that in some
moods seems the greatest of them all--"The Shepherdess" (Pl. 9), that
is, or used to be, in the Chauchard collection. In this nobly tranquil
work, in which there is no hint of sadness or revolt, are to be found
all his usual inevitableness of composition and perfection of
draughtsmanship--note the effect of repetition in the sheep, "forty
feeding like one"--but the glory of the picture is in the infinite
recession of the plain that lies flat, the exact notation of the
successive positions upon it of the things that stand upright, from the
trees and the hay wain in the extreme distance, almost lost in sky,
through the sheep and the sheep-dog and the shepherdess herself,
knitting so quietly, to the dandelions in the foreground, each with its
"aureole" of light. Of these simple, geometrical relations, and of the
enveloping light and air by which they are expressed, he has made a hymn
of praise.

The background of "The Gleaners," with its baking stubble-field under