Millet, with his marvellous power of observation, painted his landscapes with the fidelity of his school in that art, and so keenly realized the religious element in the peasant life about him—­the poetry of these people—­that he portrayed his figures in a manner quite his own—­at the same time realistic and full of idealism.  MacColl in his “Nineteenth-Century Art” called Millet “the most religious figure in modern art after Rembrandt,” and adds that “he discovered a patience of beauty, a reconciling, in the concert of landscape mystery with labor.”

Shall we call Bastien Lepage a follower of Millet, or say that in these men there was a unity of spirit; that while they realized the poetry of their subjects intensely, they fully estimated the reality as well?

The “Joan of Arc” is a phenomenal example of this art.  The landscape is carefully realistic, and like that in which a French peasant girl of any period would live.  But here realism ceases and the peasant girl becomes a supremely exalted being, entranced by a vision of herself in full armor.

This art, at once realistic and idealistic, is an achievement of the nineteenth century—­so clear and straightforward in its methods as to explain itself far better than words can explain it.

* * * * *

Contemporary with these last-named artists were the Pre-raphaelites.  The centre of this school was called the Brotherhood, which was founded by J. E. Millais, W. Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Michael Rossetti.  To these were added Thomas Woolner the sculptor, James Collins, and F. G. Stephens.  Other important artists known as Pre-raphaelites, not belonging to the Brotherhood, are Ford Madox Brown and Burne Jones, as well as the water-color painters, Mason, Walker, Boyce, and Goodwin.

The aim of these artists was to represent with sincerity what they saw, and the simple sincerity of painters who preceded Raphael led them to choose a name which Ruskin called unfortunate, “because the principles on which its members are working are neither pre- nor post-Raphaelite, but everlasting.  They are endeavoring to paint with the highest possible degree of completion what they see in nature, without reference to conventional established rules; but by no means to imitate the style of any past epoch.  To paint Nature—­Nature as it was around them, by the help of modern science, was the aim of the Brotherhood.”

At the time when the Pre-raphaelite School came into being the art of other lands as well as that of England was in need of an awakening impulse, and the Pre-raphaelite revolt against conventionality and the machine-like art of the period roused such interest, criticism, and opposition as to stimulate English art to new effort, and much of its progress in the last half-century is doubtless due to the discussions of the theories of this movement as well as of the works it produced.