[Illustration:  Plate 5.—­Millet.  “The Potato Planters.”  In the Quincy A. Shaw Collection.]

If even Millet never again attained quite the august impressiveness of this picture it is because no other action of rustic man has so wide or so deep a meaning for us as this of sowing.  All the meaning there is in an action he could make us feel with entire certainty, and always he proceeds by this method of elimination, concentration, simplification, insistence on the essential and the essential only.  One of the most perfect of all his pictures—­more perfect than “The Sower” on account of qualities of mere painting, of color, and of the rendering of landscape, of which I shall speak later—­is “The Gleaners” (Pl. 3).  Here one figure is not enough to express the continuousness of the movement; the utmost simplification will not make you feel, as powerfully as he wishes you to feel it, the crawling progress, the bending together of back and thighs, the groping of worn fingers in the stubble.  The line must be reinforced and reduplicated, and a second figure, almost a facsimile of the first, is added.  Even this is not enough.  He adds a third figure, not gathering the ear, but about to do so, standing, but stooped forward and bounded by one great, almost uninterrupted curve from the peak of the cap over her eyes to the heel which half slips out of the sabot, and the thing is done.  The whole day’s work is resumed in that one moment.  The task has endured for hours and will endure till sunset, with only an occasional break while the back is half-straightened—­there is not time to straighten it wholly.  It is the triumph of significant composition, as “The Sower” is the triumph of significant draughtsmanship.

Or, when an action is more complicated and difficult of suggestion, as is that, for instance, of digging, he takes it at the beginning and at the end, as in “The Spaders” (Pl. 4), and makes you understand everything between.  One man is doubled over his spade, his whole weight brought to bear on the pressing foot which drives the blade into the ground.  The other, with arms outstretched, gives the twisting motion which lets the loosened earth fall where it is to lie.  Each of these positions is so thoroughly understood and so definitely expressed that all the other positions of the action are implied in them.  You feel the recurrent rhythm of the movement and could almost count the falling of the clods.

So far did Millet push the elimination of non-essentials that his heads have often scarcely any features, his hands, one might say, are without fingers, and his draperies are so simplified as to suggest the witty remark that his peasants are too poor to afford any folds in their garments.  The setting of the great, bony planes of jaw and cheek and temple, the bulk and solidity of the skull, and the direction of the face—­these were, often enough, all he wanted of a head.  Look at the hand of the woman in “The Potato Planters” (Pl. 5), or at those of the