"Gleaning. J.F. Millet, painter. A. Masson, engraver. Two or three months only have elapsed since the death of the eminent French painter Millet was recorded in our pages; and now we are in a position to offer the reader an example of his rural compositions. M. About, in his brilliant and masterly notice of the French Exhibition of 1855, thus writes of him—then but recently known in Paris circles of art: 'I would not terminate this list and address myself to landscape-painters without cheering the arrival among us of a great artist, who, in the sabots of a peasant, treads in the footsteps of Michael Angelo and Lesueur. John Francis Millet proves to every man with eyes in his head that art lies not concealed at the bottom of a cave hard by the Tiber, and that one could master it without going further than our village of Barbizon. Born in a Normandy cabin, hardened from his infancy in the rude labours of the field; drawing his instruction, well or ill, as it might be, from the priest of his parish; initiated into classic antiquity by a bad translation of the Georgics ; escaping out of the atelier of Delaroche as Moses was rescued from the Nile, he made his home close to Fontainebleau, in the companionship of his wife, his children, and nature. He had wielded the pickaxe, cracked his cartwhip, pushed his plough, and threshed out corn in the barn, before he learned how a pencil was to be handled; and I would lay a wager that when the peasants of his neighbourhood saw him pass near them, as he went along with his sketching apparatus and protective umbrella, they opened wide their doors and said, 'Come in under our roof, you are one of us.' This toiler of old in the fields sought not for poetry in books, like Ary Scheffer; nor in museums, like Picot; nor in piled stuff-tints of millinery, like Muller; he replenished his cup at the sacred spring whence Lucretius and Virgil, and, before them, divine Homer, drew their pellucid draughts.' In such subjects as this 'Gleaning', Millet was perfectly at home—among scenes not only of his boyhood, but with which his whole life was conversant. These female peasants of the Norman type are capitally drawn and picturesquely placed, as they gather up the scattered ears of wheat from the field under the rays of an afternoon's sun : the atmosphere of the picture is suggestive of intense heat. M. Masson’s plate is etched with great spirit, and with true artistic effect."--The art journal, loc. cit.
