The especial study of the nineteenth century was landscape, and Millet was so far a man of his time that he was a great landscape painter; but his treatment of landscape was unlike any other, and, like his own treatment of the figure, in its insistence on essentials, its elimination of the accidental, its austere and grand simplicity.  I have heard, somewhere, a story of his saying, in answer to praise of his work or inquiry as to his meaning:  “I was trying to express the difference between the things that lie flat and the things that stand upright.”  That is the real motive of one of his masterpieces—­one that in some moods seems the greatest of them all—­“The Shepherdess” (Pl. 9), that is, or used to be, in the Chauchard collection.  In this nobly tranquil work, in which there is no hint of sadness or revolt, are to be found all his usual inevitableness of composition and perfection of draughtsmanship—­note the effect of repetition in the sheep, “forty feeding like one”—­but the glory of the picture is in the infinite recession of the plain that lies flat, the exact notation of the successive positions upon it of the things that stand upright, from the trees and the hay wain in the extreme distance, almost lost in sky, through the sheep and the sheep-dog and the shepherdess herself, knitting so quietly, to the dandelions in the foreground, each with its “aureole” of light.  Of these simple, geometrical relations, and of the enveloping light and air by which they are expressed, he has made a hymn of praise.

The background of “The Gleaners,” with its baking stubble-field under the midday sun, its grain stacks and laborers and distant farmstead, all tremulous in the reflected waves of heat, indistinct and almost indecipherable yet unmistakable, is nearly as wonderful; and no one has ever so rendered the solemnity and the mystery of night as has he in the marvellous “Sheepfold” of the Walters collection.  But the greatest of all his landscapes—­one of the greatest landscapes ever painted—­is his “Spring” (Pl. 10), of the Louvre, a pure landscape this time, containing no figure.  In the intense green of the sunlit woods against the black rain-clouds that are passing away, in the jewel-like brilliancy of the blossoming apple-trees, and the wet grass in that clear air after the shower; in the glorious rainbow drawn in dancing light across the sky, we may see, if anywhere in art, some reflection of the “infinite splendors” which Millet tells us he saw in nature.

[Illustration:  Plate 8.—­Millet.  “The First Steps.”]

In the face of such results as these it seems absurd to discuss the question whether or not Millet was technically a master of his trade, as if the methods that produced them could possibly be anything but good methods for the purpose; but it is still too much the fashion to say and think that the great artist was a poor painter—­to speak slightingly of his accomplishment in oil-painting and to seem to prefer