To the end of his days, Millet never left his beloved Barbizon.  He stopped there, wandering about the fields, watching peasants at work, imprinting their images firmly upon his eye and brain, and then going home again to put the figures he had thus observed upon his vivid canvas.  For, strange to say, unlike almost every other great painter, Millet never painted from a model.  Instead of getting a man or woman to sit for him in the pose he required, he would go out into the meadows and look at the men and women at their actual daily occupations; and so keen and acute was his power of observation, and so retentive was his inner eye, that he could then recall almost every detail of action or manner as clearly as if he had the original present in his studio before him.  As a rule, such a practice is not to be recommended to any one who wishes to draw with even moderate accuracy; constant study of the actual object, and frequent comparison by glancing from object to copy, are absolutely necessary for forming a correct draughtsman.  But Millet knew his own way best; and how wonderfully minute and painstaking must his survey have been when it enabled him to reproduce the picture of a person afterwards in every detail of dress or movement.

He did not paint very fast.  He preferred doing good work to much work—­an almost invariable trait of all the best workmen.  During the thirty-one years that he worked independently, he produced only eighty pictures—­not more, on an average, than two or three a year.  Compared with the rate at which most successful artists cover canvas to sell, this was very slow.  But then, Millet did not paint mainly to sell; he painted to satisfy his own strict ideas of what constituted the highest art.  His pictures are usually very simple in their theme; take, for example, his “Angelus,” painted at the height of his fame, in 1867.  A man and a woman are working in the fields—­two poor, simple-minded, weather-beaten, devout French peasants.  It is nightfall; the bell called the “Angelus” rings out from the church steeple, and the two poor souls, resting for a moment from their labours, devote a few seconds to the silent prayers enjoined by their church.  That is all; and yet in that one picture the sorrows, the toils, and the consolations of the needy French peasantry are summed up in a single glimpse of a pair of working and praying partners.

Millet died somewhat suddenly in 1875.  Strong and hearty as he was, even the sturdy health of the Norman peasant had been undermined by the long hardships of his early struggles, and his constitution gave way at last with comparative rapidity.  Still, he had lived long enough to see his fame established, to enjoy ten years of ease and honour, and to find his work cordially admired by all those for whose admiration he could have cared to make an effort.  After his death, the pictures and unfinished sketches in his studio were sold for 321,000 francs, a little