From the time he reached Barbizon there came into his work a largeness, a
majesty and an elevation that is unique in the history of art. Millet's
heart went out to humanity--the humanity that springs from the soil,
lives out its day, and returns to earth. His pictures form an epic of
country life, as he tells of its pains, its anxieties, its
privations--yes, of its peace and abiding faith, and the joy and health
and strength that comes to those who live near to Nature's heart.

Walt Whitman catalogues the workers and toilers, and lists their
occupations in pages that will live; Millet shows us wood-gatherers,
charcoal-burners, shepherds, gleaners, washerwomen, diggers, quarrymen,
road laborers, men at the plow, and women at the loom. Then he shows the
noon-hour, the moments of devotion, the joys of motherhood, the silent
pride of the father, the love of brother and sister and of husband and
wife. And again in the dusk of a winter night we see black-lined against
the sky the bent figure of an old woman, bearing her burden of fagots;
and again we are shown the plain, homely interior of a cottage where the
family watches by the bedside of a dying child.

And always the picture is not quite complete--the faces are never
distinct--no expression of feature is there, but the soul worked up into
the canvas conveys its silent message to all those who have eyes to see
and hearts to feel.

Only a love and sympathy as wide as the world could have produced the
"Gleaners," the "Sower" and the "Angelus."

Millet was what he was on account of what he had endured. All art is at
last autobiography.