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JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

demands. Corot lived entirely outside of politics, not knowing what was going on around him, gentle and calm, hating revolutions and saying that "art is love." Theodore Rousseau, with his thirst for solitude and his scorn for all political or artistic cliques, said: "What has art to do with those things? Art will never come except from some little disregarded corner where some isolated man is studying the mysteries of nature, fully assured that the answer which he finds and which is good for him is good also for humanity, whatever may be the number of succeeding generations." Millet, who was more directly touched than the others by the appellation of socialist because he was not only a painter of landscapes but also and especially a painter of peasants whom he represented with unvarnished realism, protested all his life against the label applied to him. "I repudiate with all my might the democ (democratic) side, as understood in club language," he wrote on the 23rd of April 1867. "I am a peasant of peasants." He thought with Corot that "the mission of art is a mission of love, not of hate, and that, when it presents the sufferings of the poor, it should

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