e many in those days who tried with little or no excuse to
break in on the work of a man whose working days were already counted,
and who was seldom free from his old enemy _migraine_. I was to
learn this when--I hope after having had the grace to make it plain
that, though I greatly desired to know Millet, I felt no desire to
intrude--the son had arranged for a day when, at last, I was admitted to
the studio.

Millet did not make his appearance at once; and when he came, and the
son had said a few kindly words of presentation, he seemed so evidently
in pain that I managed, in a French which must have been distinguished
by a pure New York accent and a vocabulary more than limited, to express
a fear that he was suffering, and suggested that my visit had better be
deferred.

"No, it will pass," was his answer; and going to his easel he placed,
with the help of his son, picture after picture, for my delectation.

It was Millet's habit to commence a great number of pictures. On some of
them he would work as long, according to his own expression, as he saw
the scene in nature before him; for, at least at this epoch, he never
painted directly from nature. For a picture which I saw the following
summer, where three great hay-stacks project their mass against a heavy
storm cloud, the shepherd seeking shelter from the impending rain, and
the sheep erring here and there, affected by the changing weather--for
this picture, conveying, as it did, the most intense impression of
nature, Millet showed me (in answer to my inquiry and in explanation of
his method of work) in a little sketch-book, so small that it would slip
into a waistcoat pocket, the pencilled outline of the three hay-stacks.
"It was a stormy day," he said, "and on my return home I sat down and
commenced the picture, but of direct studies--_voila tout_." Of
another picture, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, of a young girl,
life size, with a distaff, seated on a hillock, her head shaded by a
great straw hat relieved against the sky, he told me that the only
direct painting from nature on the canvas was in a bunch of grass in the
foreground, which he had plucked in the fields and brought into his
studio.

[Illustration: THE SOWER. FROM A PAINTING BY JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET.

From the original painting, now in the collection of Mrs. W.H.
Vanderbilt; reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. In his
criticism of the Salon of 1850, where the picture was first