JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
yours has been the genius that always sees the right rallying point; like Christopher Columbus, you knew where America lay. Well, now, take care; I see the point of your vessel over the torrent, and torrents only lead to the abyss. You are in contact with vulgarity, and I defy you to stay there without feeling its infection. You have already given way to the allurements of the cockney spirit by receiving ill the only true painter that has appeared since 1830. I mean François Millet."
In 1866 Millet, who had been back to Normandy on account of his sister Emilie's death, exhibited a Landscape: Gréville, which had no success. His wife, who was ill, was sent to Vichy and he went with her. The Bourbonnais country interested him greatly. He plunged afresh into a rustic life simpler than that of Barbizon, where the influence exerted by the neighbourhood of Paris was growing year by year more perceptible. "The country is bright," he wrote to Sensier, "and has some likeness to many parts of Normandy. The country people are far more really peasants than those of Barbizon; they have a good, stupid awkwardness. The women's faces in
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