estors
bequeathed him a rich heritage of strong and serious traits. From
them, too, he drew that patience and perseverance which helped him to
overcome so many obstacles in his career.

In the surroundings of his childhood he saw no pictures and heard
nothing of art or artists. Yet at a very early age he showed a
remarkable talent for drawing. His artistic temperament was inherited
from his father, who was a great lover of music and of everything
beautiful. "Look," he sometimes said, plucking a blade of grass
and showing it to his little boy, "how beautiful this is." His
grandmother, too, had a true poetic vein in her nature. She would come
to the child's bedside in the morning, calling, "Wake up, my little
Francois, you don't know how long the birds have been singing the
glory of God." In such a family the youth's gifts were readily
recognized, and he was sent to Cherbourg, the nearest large town,
to learn to be a painter. Here, and later in Paris, he received
instruction from various artists, but his greatest teacher was Nature.
So he turned from the schools of Paris, and the artificial standards
of his fellow artists there, to study for himself, at first hand, the
peasant life he wished to portray. What a delightful place Barbizon
was for such work we have seen from some of his pictures.

It was during the fruitful years of work at Barbizon that Millet
made the crayon portrait of himself which is reproduced as our
frontispiece. He was a large, strong, deep-chested man, somewhat above
the medium height. An admirer has described him as "one of nature's
noblemen," and his younger brother Pierre says he was "built like
a Hercules." He had an inherent distaste for fine clothes which he
showed even in boyhood. When he grew to be a painter, and returned to
visit his family in Greville, the villagers were scandalized to see
the city artist appear in their streets in blouse and sabots.

As we see in the portrait, Millet had long wavy hair, falling over
his shoulders, and a thick black beard. His forehead was high and
intelligent, and his nose delicately cut and sensitive. His eyes were
gray-blue, of the kind which look a man through and through and which
nothing escapes. The artist had so trained these wonderful eyes of his
that he had only to turn them on a scene to photograph the impression
indelibly on his memory.

The face that we see in the portrait is that of a thinker, a poet, and
an artist. It is the face of one