He did not paint very fast. He preferred doing good work to much work--
an almost invariable trait of all the best workmen. During the thirty-
one years that he worked independently, he produced only eighty
pictures--not more, on an average, than two or three a year. Compared
with the rate at which most successful artists cover canvas to sell,
this was very slow. But then, Millet did not paint mainly to sell; he
painted to satisfy his own strict ideas of what constituted the highest
art. His pictures are usually very simple in their theme; take, for
example, his "Angelus," painted at the height of his fame, in 1867. A
man and a woman are working in the fields--two poor, simple-minded,
weather-beaten, devout French peasants. It is nightfall; the bell called
the "Angelus" rings out from the church steeple, and the two poor souls,
resting for a moment from their labours, devote a few seconds to the
silent prayers enjoined by their church. That is all; and yet in that
one picture the sorrows, the toils, and the consolations of the needy
French peasantry are summed up in a single glimpse of a pair of working
and praying partners.

Millet died somewhat suddenly in 1875. Strong and hearty as he was, even
the sturdy health of the Norman peasant had been undermined by the long
hardships of his early struggles, and his constitution gave way at last
with comparative rapidity. Still, he had lived long enough to see his
fame established, to enjoy ten years of ease and honour, and to find his
work cordially admired by all those for whose admiration he could have
cared to make an effort. After his death, the pictures and unfinished
sketches in his studio were sold for 321,000 francs, a little less than
L13,000. The peasant boy of Greville had at last conquered all the
difficulties which obstructed his path, and had fought his own way to
fame and dignity. And in so fighting, he had steadily resisted the
temptation to pander to the low and coarse taste in art of the men by