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Popular Criticism of Jean-François Millet in Nineteenth-

Century America
a a
Laura L. Meixner & Mathew Herban III
a
Memphis State University Memphis, TN 38152
Published online: 14 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Laura L. Meixner & Mathew Herban III (1983) Popular Criticism of Jean-François Millet in Nineteenth-Century
America, The Art Bulletin, 65:1, 94-105, DOI: 10.1080/00043079.1983.10788051

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 Popular Criticism of [ean-Francois Millet in Nineteenth-Century
America
Laura L. Meixner
for Mathew Herban III
Soon after the Civil War, the popularity of [ean-Frencois
Millet (1814-1875) and his genre paintings reached
phenomenal proportions in the United States. In large
part, this was a situation created by contemporary
American critics, both amateur and professional, who,
writing skillfully evocative descriptions of the artist,
created an enduring image of Millet that instantly cap-
tivated the imaginations and sympathies of their readers
through the three routes of nostalgia, religious reference,
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and political inference. Thus, in 1876, Edward
Wheelwright, a former pupil of Millet and art critic for the
Atlantic Monthly, recalled the biblical ambience of
Millet's Barbizon home: "I could not help fancying myself
not in a house in France and in the nineteenth century, but
far away in some remote age and country, under the tent,
perhaps, of Abraham the shepherd."! Extending the
religious allusion to his mentor's demeanor, Wheelwright
further likened the artist to "an old patriarch [who] looks
as though he had been taken bodily out of the Bible" (Figs.
1, 2).2 As reverential appellations for Millet, including the
"apostle of the peasants" and the "evangelist of the
fields," gained currency in popular literature, so
Americans held firmly to their early pronouncement that
Millet's genre paintings were products of his "missionary
purpose" that evinced his "religious reverence for
humanity."> Writers possessing a more political con-
sciousness, meanwhile, attributed Millet's ready accep-
tance here to our innate democratic instincts, as when the
1 Edward Wheelwright, "Personal Recollections, Iean-Francois Millet,"
Atlalltic MOllthly, XXXVlll, 1876, 266. Wheelwright (1824-1900), a little
recognized pupil of Millet, was the Harvard classmate of his more
celebrated colleague, William Morris Hunt (1824-1879). A member of a
distinguished Boston family, he was the eldest son of Lot and Sarah
Blanchard Wheelwright. His maternal great-great-grandfather was
Joshua Blanchard, one of the builders of the Old South Church, and his
paternal great-grandfather, John Wheelwright, served at the seige of
Louisbourg in 1745 under the Seventh Massachusetts Regiment. Upon
graduation in 1844, Wheelwright sailed from Boston for Valparaiso,
Chile, touring South America for one year. Returning to Boston in 1845,
he enrolled in Harvard Law School and fulfilled a term of legal appren-
ticeship at the office of Sohier and Welch. Although admitted to the Bar
of Suffolk County on April 17, 1849, he never engaged in professional
practice. Instead, he traveled to Europe in autumn of the same year and,
settling in Paris, studied landscape painting at the atelier of Eugene Ciceri
(1813-1890) until 1851. Following a tour of Spain, Italy, and Switzerland,
he returned to France in 1855 where, provided with a letter of introduc-
tion from Hunt, he went to Barbizon to begin an eight-month period of
study with Millet. An elusive art-historical figure, Wheelwright par-
Boston Evening Transcript smugly announced, "Thank
heaven we have no party here that would dare oppose the
works of a painter on the grounds that he was a peasant,
or a Socialist."! Regardless of religious or socio-political
emphases, however, American literature concerning Millet
developed with such force that, by 1875, an anonymous
critic could rightly observe in the New York Daily
Tribune, "Ultimately, the name of Millet became a sacred
one."> Although Millet's contemporary celebrity in this
country is generally acknowledged today, no attempt has
been made to identify its sources and implications or
analyze its broader relevance to the cultural history of our
nation; nor do modern studies, focusing on Millet's paint-
ings but neglecting the painter, address the issue of
Millet's biography and peasant persona as dominant fac-
tors contributing to his sweeping popularity here. To this
end, my purpose is to introduce nineteenth-century
American criticism of Millet, a newly discovered body of
literature which will be analyzed to reveal the origins of
his reputation here, and to place his works within a new,
and international, art-historical context.
The first generation of Millet's American critics began
recording their interpretations of his paintings during the
postbellum period. Typically, they presented emphatically
sentimental religious readings of his works calculated to
elicit public emotion through poetic description and
biblical allusion. Yet from this broadly sentimental base,
two distinct trends of criticism rapidly emerged, one
ticipated in the Boston Athenaeum only twice during his lifetime, once in
1853, lending Ciceri's Forest of Fontainebleau (Museum of Fine Arts.
Boston), and again in 1858, exhibiting two of his own works, Landscape
ill Pastel and Study from Nature (locations unknown). Although his own
oeuvre was not a prodigious one, Wheelwright was an enthusiastic
collector whose estate auction (C.F. Libbie and Company, Boston, 1913)
contained 629 prints, drawings, and paintings, including six prints and
eight drawings by Hunt and two graphic works by Millet. For further
biographical information, see "Edward Wheelwright," Harvard
Graduates Magazine, IX, 1900, 108; and "Biographical Sketches of
Representative Citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,"
Americall Series of Popular Biographies, Boston, 1901,928.
'Ibid.
> Respectively, see Wesley Reid Davis, "The Angelus," Brooklyn Daily
Eagle, November 18, 1889, and Ednah Dow Cheney, "Iean-Francois
Millet," The Radical: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Religion, 11,
1867,668.
• "The Fine Arts:' Boston Evening Transcript, July 22, 1889.
s : [ean-Francois Millet." New York Daily Tribune, February 9,1875.
 CRITICISM OF MILLET IN 19TH·CENTURY AMERICA 95

romantic-nostalgic and the other socio-political. Ar-

ticulating the aftershock of the Civil War, these view-
points respectively offered Millet's genre imagery as a
final wistful evocation of America's rapidly vanishing
rural innocence, or as a pointed and timely indictment of
slavery.
The romantic coterie depicted Millet's peasants as en-
viable members of a pre-industrial culture in which man's
intimate rapport with nature conferred ethical sanction
upon his labor; these critics thereby removed any possible
negative connotations from Millet's theme of rustic toil.
An early treatment of The Gleaners, 1857 (Fig. 3), appear-
ing in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1871, completely
circumvented the issue of rural poverty when it first iden-
tified the theme of the painting as the "peacefulness of
peasant life and its harmony with nature," and then but-
tressed this notion with the following elegiac description
of the landscape elements:
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The rain and breezes, the fresh dews and the light,
gather around the peasants as their cheery compan-
ions. The placid sky bends over them, the horizon bears
no further than the comfortable little farmhouses and
stacks of wheat. These are their palaces, their pyramids,
their Orient and Occident. Travel through the world,
they will not find anything more beautiful than the
azure above; those poor noisy blase people of Paris!
How little of the sweetness of this wheat will they get
1 ].F. Millet, Self-Portrait. Cherbourg, Musee Thomas Henry
with their cafe and spiced entrees. The ... artist has
good reason to shun the boulevards and come out ... to
celebrate ... the simple life which gladly lets the deluded
world go by while it still dwells in the dear old days
when Adam delved and Eve span.s

This passage contains a concept fundamental to the poetic

strain of Millet criticism as it developed in this country -
America's tenacious faith in the superior morality of rural
life. American authors, reading The Gleaners as a valida-
tion of a theory central to our national mythology, yet one
recently challenged for the first time by the onslaught of
urbanization and industrialization, perceived an insular
Edenic civilization in the painting where, as one critic
stated, "the laborer is redeemed from the curse of toil. "7
However, to Ednah Dow Cheney, an early social critic
of Millet's paintings, labor, performed under the condi-
tions endured by the French peasantry, appeared precisely
as an anathema to humanity. Visiting Barbizon in 1855,
she was able to observe firsthand both Millet's works and

• M.D. Conway, "Edouard Frere and Sympathetic Art in France."

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, XLIII, 1871,806. 2 ].F. Millet, Self-Portrait, 1845-46. Paris, Louvre, Cabinet des
"Ibid. Dessins (photo: Giraudon)
 96 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1983 VOLUME LXV NUMBER I
3 ].F. Millet, The Gleaners. Paris, Louvre (photo: Giraudon)
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4 ].F. Millet, The Man with the Hoe, 1860-62. Private collection.
By permission of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
the way of life that inspired them.s Responding first to
Millet's personality, Cheney prefaced her remarks concern-
ing his genre paintings with the following observation
about the artist: "He was so grand in his presence that I
was reminded of the Greek's answer to the question, 'How
did you know that he was a God?' 'Because I was content
• Ednah Dow Cheney (1824-1904) traveled to Barbizon with her hus-
band, Seth Cheney (1810-1856), the noted Boston portraitist and
engraver, after Martin Brimmer, the prominent collector who had recent-
ly acquired Millet's Harvesters Resting (1852) (now Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston), introduced them to the artist's works. Upon their arrival,
the Cheneys met Millet through the offices of another of his American
pupils, William Perkins Babcock (1826-1899), a reclusive expatriate.
Despite their ensuing friendship, Cheney, in a rare example of criticism
of Babcock's art, later recalled that while he "attracted [her] by his hearty
admiration of his great master Millet, [he] never quite acquired the first
principles of drawing. His love of color and his exquisite appreciation of
it could not wholly make up for this defect and his pictures give only the
the moment my eyes fell upon him."'9 Her sacerdotal at-
titude, however, did not prevent her from reading
nationally relevant political lessons in Millet's works; and,
from the social and psychological inertia she witnessed in
the French peasant, she drew a parallel to the plight of the
slave in America. Preceding Edwin Markham's famous
poem, The Man with the Hoe (1899), by more than three
decades, she published the first American political
analysis of Millet's painting (Fig. 4):
The man leaned upon his spade. In that moment of
repose, every muscle in his frame had fallen ... into
relaxed, weary inactivity. It was not the classic repose of
the Genie du Repos Eternel, it was not the grand
strength in inaction of Michelangelo's Slave. No, it was
the patient, hopeless weariness of the overtasked
workman. As we looked, all the significant history of
the past, all the deep problems of the present opened
before us. We saw the gates of Paradise closed upon
primeval man, and the blessings taken from labor since
it was no longer in the presence and service of God, but
for mere material needs. We saw the unpaid slave of our
country, the pauper workman of France and England. 10
Sensitive to the incendiary potential of The Man with the
Hoe, Cheney offered telling insight concerning the effect
she believed the work would have upon the highly
charged atmosphere of the antebellum South: "It stirs the
soul with every great problem of life and thought. We
would as soon have trusted Garrison or Wendell Phillips
to lecture in Charleston before the war as have placed. , .
The Laborer [The Man with the Hoe] at the mercy of
slaveholders."Il
In Millet, Cheney found both an eloquent spokesman
expounding the dignity of rural labor and a strident
polemicist demanding the reform of working conditions
among the lower classes. Through an ironically ap-
propriate agricultural metaphor, she identified two com-
mon purposes in Millet's genre paintings: the confirma-
tion of the heroism of the laborer and the acknowl-
edgement of that class as a viable socio-political force.
. .. every work needful for the service of man can
become dignified and instructive, if there is a heart and
brain behind it. 50 it is with Millet. There is no stupid
content, no light merriment in his figures. A fine lady
feeling which color best expresses without the intellectual meaning
which form best reveals." See E. Cheney, Reminiscences, Boston, 1902,
140. In contrast, Cheney pointed out that Babcock's colleague Hunt was
"one of few American artists who could not complain of a defective
education. He had every opportunity which money and the interest of
friends could procure. Most of all, he had the friendship and compan-
ionship of [ean-Francois Millet, the greatest painter of modern times."
Ibid., 138. For further reading of Cheney's art criticism, see her
Gleanings in the Field of Art, Boston, 188!.
• lbid., 206.
\0 Cheney (as in n, 3),668.
II lbid., 669.
 CRITICISM OF MILLET IN I9TH·CENTURY AMERICA 97

once refused one of Millet's pictures because by the side

of the gardener pruning his vines stood a basket of
manure. Did she know that the great economical ques-
tion of the age is that same basket of manure? To utilize
the refuse, so that instead of spreading miasma and
producing fever, it shall become food for the millions
and beauty for all, is the great significant problem of the
farmer. 50 with society. Carlyle may scorn the rabble,
but it is only when every human being is recognized as
an infinitely precious part of the body politic, that
society can be peaceful and happy.P

Discerning in Millet's genre scenes a work ethic that she

characterized as the "true American idea ... common peo-
ple at their labors shown with an earnestness of feeling
and a depth of reverence," she simultaneously berated the
contemporary American propensity for sentimental por-
trayals of the worker.P Comparing Millet and Eastman 5 E. Johnson, Life in the South. New York, New-York Historical
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Johnson, she cautioned Americans against genre painting Society

that inspired naive reverie instead of assertive reform.
"Eastman Johnson," she wrote, "gives us the grace and
picturesqueness of humble life with often a touch of sweet
feeling. But, they [his works] do not move our hearts
deeply." 14 Vociferous in her denouncement of self-
conscious depictions of the laborer, Cheney castigated
them in terms alluding specifically to the imagery in
Johnson's celebrated painting, Life in the South, 18S9 (Fig.
S): IS
and think of him as unvisited by anything between
birth and death but the influences of Nature and the
ceremonials of an august religion; or, you look at him as
an ignorant, superstitious man, useful only because he
is docile, of no more spiritual interest to, or relation
with, you than animal - this will much affect your
sympathy for Jean-Francois Millet and his works.... 18

all these have something of the old feudal feeling
which thinks that common people do well enough if
they are well-fed and merry. The slaveholder, if a
tolerably decent man, loved to stand on his veranda and
watch the dancing of his slaves, and with self-satisfied
complacency felt the warm southern sun upon them all,
and flattered himself in the beauty of the Patriarchal
relation.w
As the century progressed and American criticism of
Millet grew in quantity and sophistication, it became in-
creasingly apparent that opinions concerning rural labor
and the laborer were crucial predeterminant factors con-
trolling the reception of his works here. By 1872, Eugene
Benson observed that these social attitudes readily fell into
two categories, which he distinguished in Appleton's
lournal-v
Whether you look at the peasant with the eye of a poet
Preserving Cheney's peasant-slave analogy, he continued,
"The peasant of France, according to the spirit that con-
templates him, is a careless and unambitious being, much
like the negro of our southern plantations; or, he is heavy
and patient, struck with the sadness of the soil, his back
rounded, his eyes always upon the earth, from which he
wrings a scanty subsistence.r'w Turning the correlation to
serve an opposite purpose, however, Benson saw the state
of the peasantry not as reflective of universal social ills, in-
cluding our own, but as convenient evidence of the
superiority of American agrarian life (Figs. 6, 7):
In France, the peasant is shut off from all the influences
that form modern man. He is ignorant of the great fluc-
tuations of the political world, ignorant of the "im-
provements of industry"; he knows little or nothing of
cities; he can hardly be said to think. He neither reads
nor writes; the horizon of his field is the only one
known to him, for he never travels; ... he seems a

11 Ibid., 671-672. .7 Eugene Benson (1839.1909), a New York portraitist and figure paint-
IJ [bid. er. frequently supplemented his income as an artist with literary criticism
he contributed to the New York Euening Post under the pseudonym
" Ibid.
"Proteus." For an early statement by Benson concerning private collec-
ts Johnson's Life in the South derived its enormous following in part tions of Millet's paintings in New York, see "Pictures in Private Galleries
from the fact that both slaveholders and abolitionists interpreted it as an of New York," Putnam's Magazine, VI, 1870, 86.
apologia for their viewpoints. For a review of contemporary criticism of
.> Eugene Benson, "The Peasant-Painter: [ean-Francois Millet,"
the painting, see Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson, New York, 1973, 32-
Appleton's Journal, IV, 1872, 404.
33.
I. Ibid.
I. Cheney, 1867, 671.
 98 THE ART BUllETIN MARCH 1983 VOLUME LXV NUMBER 1

primitive man ... a type which is rarely seen here. '"

The toil, the patient dumb look of men and women who
have no part in the great march of improvement and
emancipation, the aspect of life so detached from what
we understand as life in our century is pathetic and
strange.... 20

American technology, or Yankee ingenuity, on the other

hand, opened broad vistas to our rural laborers, preventing
a similar regional isolation. As Benson explained, "Here,
the newspapers and railroads connect the most remote and
rural districts with the great centers of city life...."21
The self-serving tone of Benson's essay and his allusion
to our recent emancipation of the slaves predicted the
future direction of Millet criticism in this country; and,
although nostalgia remained at the center of the sentimen-
tal current of the literature, the postbellum era ushered in
new and far more aggressive attitudes. For as the Civil
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War altered the face of rural America, so too did it change

6 W.5. Mount, The Herald in the Country, 1853. New York,
Museum at Stony Brook, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville'
the requirements of our national self-image. Romantic
longing for a return to our agrarian origins was soon dis-
placed by smug pride in technical advancements that turned
to blatant chauvinism when our adulation of modernity,
voiced here by Benson, quickly caused Millet's peasants
to become objects of pity.
Embracing the newfound prosperity awarded by in-
dustry, Americans began to perceive the European peas-
ants' way of life, which they had once regarded as poetic
in its communion with the land, as primitive in its crude
toil. The cultural and socio-economic rift between Millet's
genre paintings and the American public was vividly un-
derscored by Wheelwright who, recounting his Barbizon
experience, referred to himself as a witness possessing the
"unfamiliar eye of a stranger from the New World."22
fascinated yet repelled by the hardships imposed upon the
peasantry by their lack of modern farm implements, he of-
fered the following observation, which evokes Millet's
Men Digging, 1866 (Fig. 8):

The plows, each drawn ... by two horses, were, to a

Yankee eye, exceedingly heavy and clumsy.... The
small cultivators, instead of plowing, dug their fields
over with a spade, whence those who performed the
operation were called becheurs. . . . The fields were
cleared of stubble .. , by a sort of hoe ... the blade being
as broad as a shovel. It seems a clumsy tool, and is very
fatiguing to use. None of the tasks which fall to the lot
of the French peasant have a more pathetic significance
than that of the becheur, none speaks more plainly of
the poverty, the hardship, the helplessness of his lot. 23
7 I.F. Millet, The Vinetender. The Hague, Rijksmuseum, H.W.
Mesdag As a natural consequence of profuse mournful accounts
of French rural life printed in journals here, Americans ex-
perienced a mounting sympathy for Millet's peasant
heritage, a sentiment that frequently accounted for, and at

20 Ibid. 22 Wheelwright (as in n. 1). 265.

21 Ibid. 23 Ibid .. 264.

times overshadowed, their interest in his genre oeuvre per
se. Controlling the literature throughout the 1880's, a
dominant biographical trend in Millet criticism was ini-
tiated at the beginning of the decade with the publication
of Alfred Sensier's monograph, La vie et l'oeuure de lean-
Frant;ois Millet. Translated by Helena deKay Gilder, the
narrative biography, appearing in 1880 under her new ti-
tle, ]ean-Fran(ois Millet: Peasant and Painter, became the
single most widely read source on the artist in the United
States during the nineteenth century.>' Sensier's romantic
depiction of Millet's life as one of stalwart virtue and ab-
ject poverty immediately appealed to both those
Americans who clung nostalgically to traditional concepts
concerning the morality of rural life and their more
patronizing contemporaries who interpreted poverty as
the inevitable penalty of an inferior agrarian system. The
majority of Sensiers American readers, however,
remained wholly unaware of his frequent gratuitous ex-
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aggerations of certain aspects of Millet's biography, par-
ticularly those pertaining to his financial encumbrances;
the artist's following in this country, therefore, was one
based largely upon an admixture of fable and fact rather
than a straightforward accounting of Millet's life and
career.P
The profound influence exercised by Sensier's work is
attested to by the number of essays adopting its tone and
content that were not confined to the domain of popular
literature, but fell within the purview of criticism
published by American painters. In 1881, for example,
George Inness (1825-1894), responding to Sensier's
emphasis upon Millet's religious character, referred to him
as an "artistic angel" when he stated, "His aim was to
represent pure and holy sentiments - sentiments which
speak of home, of love, of labor, of sorrow, and so on. He
is the first in that class of painters who reproduce such
sentiments in their paintings, and in his paintings do we
find the highest of these sentiments. "26 The following
year, Helen Bigelow Merriman, a pupil of William Morris
Hunt, drew upon Sensier's model and her mentor's ad-
miration for Millet to produce a lecture entitled" A Study
" Helena deKay Gilder and her husband, Richard Watson Gilder, the
prominent journalist and publisher, traveled to France in 1879, "seeking
details with respect to the life and works of Millet." Through the
assistance of Millet's son Francois, they obtained the advance sheets of
Sensier's manuscript from its French publisher, Quantin. With no small
amount of pride, Americans realized that, in addition to amassing rapidly
the largest collections of Millet's paintings in the world, they were now
granted access to the "hitherto sealed book of Millet's life even before it
had been read in France. " The woJk, available in both monograph and
serial form, appeared in four consecutive installments in Scrib,ler's
Morzthly Magazirze, xx, 1880,825-840; XXI, 1880, 101-110, 189-200, 392-
406.
"It was not until much later in the century, after the American Art
Association's purchase of Millet's Arzgelus (1858) for a record $110,000
in 1889, that the public became cognizant of the half-truths contained in
Sensier's monograph. The ire aroused by this realization was brought
forward in editorials such as the following statement from the New York
Commercial Advertiser, July 13, 1889: "I was recently told by a French
CRITICISM OF MillET IN 19TH-CENTURY AMERICA 99
8 I.F. Millet, Men Digging. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Shaw
Fund
of the Life and Works of [ean-Francois Millet," which she
delivered to the Worcester Art Society. Sustaining Sen-
sier's moralizing tenor, Merriman's analysis of Millet's
works demonstrates the fixedness of urban-rural contrasts
as they were brought to bear upon his genre paintings:
His art was religious in the best sense. Not arresting our
thought on some single individual like the old pictures
of saints and martyrs, but showing us, under the sim-
plest forms, the universal movement of life in the breast
of nature. The charm of his pictures lies in the fervent
sweetness with which his figures perform the simplest
actions, thereby giving them sacramental dignity. No
wonder the French public did not understand them. The
gulf between them was as wide as between the sacred
joys of the fireside and the glare of the boulevard - be-
tween the Bible and Gil Blasp
The sentimental emphasis of Sensiers monograph,
along with the pathetic anecdotes it related, promulgated
artist who knew Millet well that the stories of his extreme poverty and
the miserable life he had led were more or less apocryphal. 'He was a peas-
ant: said my informant, •and he led the life of a peasant, letting his
children run wild and without education, but he lived well Eor a man of
his station of life and the money he made ... was a handsome income.
Moreover, he was lazy, and only painted when he felt inclined ... '" For
similar accounts, see the New York Commercial Advertiser, July 10,
1889, and the New York Triburze. November 3,1889. Further insight into
this issue is to be had in Robert Herbert, "Millet Revisited 1," Burlington
Magazine, CIV, 1962,205.
2. As quoted by George Sheldon, American Painters with One Hundred
and Four Examples of Their Work. New York, 1881,34.
27Helen Bigelow Merriman, A Study of the Life and Works of Jean-
Fra'lI;ois Millet, Worcester. 1882, 2. Also reprinted in the Worcester Spy,
February 28. 1882. For the most recent scholarship concerning Merriman
and a complete listing of her lectures, see Martha Hoppin, "Women Art-
ists in Boston. 1870-1900: The Pupils of William Morris Hunt,"
American Art Journal, XIII, 1981. 17-46.
 100 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1983 VOLUME LXV NUMBER 1
9 ]. Thompson, The Haymakers, Mount Mansfield, Vermont,
1859. Private collection (courtesy Hirschl and Adler Galleries,
Inc., New York)
the myth of Millet as a destitute artist whose talents were
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ignored by his own countrymen. However, as evidenced
by Gilder's alteration of Sensier's title, American readers
consistently responded to Millet primarily as a pitiable
French peasant and secondarily as a struggling French
painter. More than indignation at the imagined neglect
that Millet suffered as an artist, Americans experienced
pity for the plight of the entire social class he represented
to them. Subtly conflating art criticism and biographical
narrative, writers produced a plethora of plaintive
literature which, through the bathos it generated,
strengthened ties between Millet's biography and his
genre imagery. Representative of this trend is an article
published in the Magazine of American History, 1887,
which the author recommended for study "in connection
with the masterpieces of Jean-Francois Millet." Equating
the painter with the figures he depicted, the writer submit-
ted that" every reader will be interested in the following
biographical sketch [which] deserves to be put alongside
the paintings it describes":
An evening in an indigent peasant's cabin; the poorly
clothed children, shivering with cold, returning from
school; others, mere infants, cast an apprehensive look
into the eating room and ask why the table is not set.
The mother regards them affectionately; her eyes seem
to interrogate the husband on his entrance; and he falls
despairingly into the rude wooden armchair and rests
his head upon his hands. Today there is nothing to eat
in the humble home at Barbizon. The inhabitants of the
home are in need of everything.>
One result of the American understanding of Millet as an
"indigent peasant" was that, gradually, political con-
sciousness began to influence art patronage as we came to
view our artistic preferences, and especially purchases, as
ethical acts. In the face of America's burgeoning
20Albert Wolff, .. jean-Francois Millet," Magazine of American Art, XVII,
1887,509.
2. Thomas Gold Appleton, review of A. Sensier, La vie et l'oeuvre de
prosperity, the French peasantry, as represented and em.
bodied by Millet, appeared compelling in its penury.
Analyzing Millet's genre oeuvre through the doubly con.
descending biases of class consciousness and national
pride, Thomas Gold Appleton clearly stated the role of
America as emancipator and savior of the French peasant:
He [Millet] hoped it [his oeuvre] might quicken the con-
science of luxury to the cry of want - that cry which,
when it calls itself Socialism, proclaims anarchy as
God's solution to the unequality of human conditions.
The future of Europe is in these pictures of Millet, for
that solution is apparently impossible. Nor is it without
meaning that from the clear sunshine of America we
look at these sad bands of peasants, so near the mental
level of their fellow workers, the cattle, with an amazed
pity; for we are the core of the solution. We know no
peasantry. Nature touches with the aristocracy of own-
ership the poor immigrant as he struggles to our
shores. We receive the overplus of the dangerous
swarms of Europe, landless and foodless, and make
them into men and feed those that are left at home from
our overflowing stores. Therefore. America loves these
pathetic figures of Millet, these types of a lifestyle so
foreign to our own, this poetry of poverty.... (Fig. 9)29
Appleton's thesis was pivotal to Millet criticism as it
developed during the 1880's. Repeatedly, and ironically,
authors presented Millet's laborers as grim personifica-
tions of a penury they stubbornly held to be nonexistenl
in this country. But, by mid-century, the state of the
American rural populace, along with its accurate depiction
in native genre painting, had become a much debated
point among our critics, novelists, and artists.
Wheelwright, maintaining that the parallels between
French and American farm life were more numerous than
the contrasts, argued that we lacked only an American
genre painter possessing the necessary biographical in-
sights to bring these similarities to light. Assessing Hunt
as a painter of the New England scene, he applauded his
friend's genre oeuvre for depicting "that sad, pathetic
story of the hard. laborious, joyless life of the small farmer
in New England - a life of which, for the most part, we
have had, in painting at least, only caricatures, but which
contains. when rightly seen, as many elements of poetry as
that of the French peasants whom Millet had made im-
mortaI."30 Yet simultaneously, Wheelwright added the
following qualification to his praise of an unidentified
genre scene by Hunt:
But admirably, on the whole, as the story is told, effec-
tively as every part of the picture is made to help in the
telling, Mr. Hunt has not quite succeeded in giving it, in
the genuine Yankee dialect, with the strong flavor of the
[ean-Francois Millet, in American Art Review, 11,1881,245.
'0 Wheelwright, "Three Boston Painters," Atlantic Monthly, XL, 1877,
711.
 CRITICISM OF MILLET IN 19TH·CENTURY AMERICA 101

soil about it, as Burns or Millet would have done had

they been born in New England. Neither the men nor
the oxen, nor even the apple trees are of pure Yankee
type; and the whole picture has something of a foreign
air. There is a want of that perfection of local coloring
which we can never hope to see fully realized in the por-
traiture of the rural life of New England until some
youth, "native here and to the manner born," shall, as
Millet did, quit the plow handle and the scythe for the
palette and brush, and ... qualify himself to render a
tardy justice to the race from which he sprang.»

Concurring with Wheelwright, William Dean Howells

later seconded the critic's call for a native painter of the
American scene through the character of Ludlow in his
novel, The Coast of Bohemia (1893). The attitude of the
fictional artist, as portrayed by Howells, nonetheless
reflects a reluctance on the part of Americans to acknowl-
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edge the negative side of that scene:

Ludlow believed that if the right fellow ever came to

work, he could get as much pathos out of our farm folks
as Millet got out of his Barbizon peasants. But the fact
was that he was not the fellow. He wanted to paint
beauty, not pathos; and he thought, so far as he thought
ethically about it, that Americans needed to be shown
the festive and joyous aspect of their common life. To
discover and represent these was his pleasure as an art- 10 J.F. Millet, Peasant Family, 1871. Cardiff, National Museum
ist and his duty as a citizen.ss of Wales

Despite these and other summons for an American

genre tradition predicated on the example of Millet's
realism, the consensus remained the one articulated by
Thomas Gold Appleton and restated by Will Hicok Low
(1853-1932), who was a pupil of Millet during the early
1870's. Opposing Wheelwright's view, Low resisted any
comparison between the American farmer and French peas-
ant. In his memoirs of his Barbizon sojourn, A Chronicle
of Friendships, he unequivocally stated, "The peasant
lacks the superficial refinement and quasi-education with
which our common schools have veneered our masses; in
the land of plenty we have as yet no conditions that
parallel those that confront the rural populace of
France."JJ
Through such manipulative and chauvinistic criticism
focused on the rural blight of France, writers convinced a
believing nation that Millet's peasants symbolized a social
stratum whose lot could only be improved through our
benefaction. Conveniently, this type of aggrandizing
literature not only fed the moral self-esteem of our coun-
try, but concurrently fostered the notion of America's
legendary agrarian largesse and well-being.
In reality, Appleton and his contemporaries were obtuse
in their consistent refusal to acknowledge our own rural 11 T.H. O'Sullivan. Slave Family: South Carolina Cotton
poor. We may have "known no peasantry" per se, but the Plantation. 1862. Washington, D.C., Library of Congress
concatenation of problems facing the post-war farmer, par-
ticularly the freed slave, made his situation an equally JI Ibid .• 712.
grim one (Figs. 10, 11). For both black and white dispirited J2 William Dean Howells. Coast of Bohemia. New York. 1893.6.
farmers in the South, land and money shortages led to the JJ Will Hicok Low. A Chronicle of Friendships. New York. 1907. 130.
 102 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1983 VOLUME LXV NUMBER 1
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12 ].F. Millet, The Angelus, 1858. Paris, Louvre (photo:
Giraudon)
13 S.A. Butcher, W.H. Blair of Huckleberry, near Broken Bow,
Nebraska, 1888 (detail). Lincoln, Nebraska State Historical
Society
entrapment of sharecropping, a system that held them in
peonage to the town merchant. But in all regions there
were to be found embattled and debt-ridden farmers
fighting the crushing effects of hard currency, over-
capitalization of the railroad, and high interest rates, all
factors contributing to the Panic of 1873 when the bottom
virtually dropped out of the produce rnarket.» These
truths, however, remained wholly unrecognized by critics
who, synthesizing the sentimental and political currents of
the literature, produced interminable mournful accounts
of Millet's biography and dismal portrayals of the
deplorable conditions characterizing peasant life. Viewed
within this dominant approach, Millet's imagery inspired
H For an excellent source book concerning the socio-economic situation
in America between the Civil War and World War I. see John Denovo,
ed.. The Gilded Age and After: Selected Readings in American History,
New York. 1972.
a great deal of pathos but little insight into the genuine
nature of his subject matter, a situation that precluded the
drawing of any significant parallels from French to
American rural society.
In 1891, however, the seemingly unfulfilled promise of
Cheney's incisive social criticism was renewed with the
publication of Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads.
Graphic depictions of life in the American West, Garland's
stories unflinchingly thrust the cruel realities of farm life
upon the public; and, almost at once, literary critics per-
ceived in the novelist a commonality with Millet. Review-
ing the short stories, ].E. Chamberlain stated in the Writer:
Garland's bits of description, which came into his
stories like accidental lights in a painting, are often-
times as perfect as a picture by Millet and as full of
color. This, for example, from "Up the Coule": "A
farm in the valley. The plowman clad in a ragged gray
coat, with uncouth, muddy boots upon his feet, walked
with his head inclined toward the sleet to shield his face
from the cold sting of it. The soil rolled away, black and
sticky, with a dull sheen upon it."35
Advancing Chamberlain's stylistic comparison, C. T.
Copeland, a critic for the Atlantic Monthly, interpreted
the imagery of Millet and Garland as mutually reflective:
Garland's West is not the beckoning Occident of enter-
prise and "push" and fortune that may be had for
fighting, if not asking. His West is the other side of the
shield. The right to vote and an American education
cannot raise men and women who are really no more
than beasts of burden much above the level of an op-
pressed peasantry, except that knowledge and right
confer on them the dignity of a sharper unhappiness.
The remembrance of Mr. Garland's people, after the
book is laid aside, is ... that of a class, and not of the in-
dividuals - of a vast company with worn stolid faces,
toiling in the fields all day without remission. Even the
Angelus is denied them (Figs. 12, 13).36
Confronted by Millet's paintings alone, American critics
had been unable to abstract from them any significant
awarenesses regarding social problems here; now, through
the medium of American Realist literature, especially Gar-
land's, they were able to return to Millet's genre scenes
with a heightened consciousness and therefore extract
more meaningful and accurate lessons.
By far the most clamorous social criticism that appeared
in the aftermath of Garland's publication was Edwin
Markham's The Man with the Hoe, a poem that exacer-
bated the growing controversy over the actual nature of
rural life in the United States. The famous opening stanza,
>5 J.E. Chamberlain, "Hamlin Garland's Work," The Writer, v, 1891,
208.
J. C.T. Copeland, "The Short Story," Atlantic Monthly, LXIX, 1892, 208.

penned "after seeing Millet's world famous painting,"
reads:
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon the hoe and gazes on the ground.
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?37
Although Markham's verse immediately met with indig-
nant protest, Americans did not find the poem itself nearly
as objectionable as its author's personal identification with
the laborer and his implied equation of the French peasant
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and the American farmer. A native of California,
Markham had risen from the ranks of the western farmers
and was well qualified to attest to their hardships from his
own experience. Identifying himself as a member of the
"hoernanry," he corroborated Garland's pessimistic
testimony concerning rural life in the American West:
I was myself a working man, under hard and incorrigi-
ble conditions. The smack of the soil and the whir of the
forge are in my blood. I came to know every coign and
cranny of the farmer's life; the breaking of the ground
with the plow; the sowing and harrowing of the field;
the heading, threshing, and sacking of the wheat; I
know the hard endless work in the hot sun, the endless
leak in the roof that cannot be stopped because there is
no money in the purse, the merciless clutch of hunger
when the last crust has gone from the cupboard. I know
what it means to fight against the despair of the heart
when the mortgage is overdue and the prices of
products have fallen. I came to see that Millet puts
before us no chance peasant, no mere man of the fields.
" The remainder of the poem reads:
Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream he dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this -
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed -
More filled with signs and portents of the soul-
More fraught with menace to the universe.
What gulfs between him and seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn. the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
CRITICISM OF MILLET IN 19TH-CENTURY AMERICA 103
No, he bodies forth for us betrayed Humanity - the
Toiler ground down through the ages of oppression,
through ages of injustice. He shows us the man pushed
away from the land by the monopoly of those who fail
to use the land, till at last he had become a serf with no
mind in his muscles and no heart in his handiwork.>
Widely reproduced in journals and newspapers with ac-
companying photographs of Millet's painting, Markham's
poem was taken up by advocates of rural reform as their
anthem. Typical of the supportive response to Markham's
work was M.T. Elder's essay, "The Man with the Hoe,"
which appeared in the Louisiana-based periodical,
Donahoe's Magazine. Elder, who saw the plight of the
rural Southerner reflected in Markham's poem and
Millet's painting, decried America's neglect of its rural
populace and called upon the Church to lead the way to
social reform:
Undeniably, our Lord's own example and teachings
were markedly pastoral, rural, and agricultural. Did he
wish that to show us that we must despise the man with
the hoe? Why do we depart from - aye, diametrically
contradict our Saviour's precepts, and give our best, not
to say our entire efforts to the town? We are bent upon
belonging wholly to the cities and getting as far away as
possible from the man with the hoe. We have concen-
trated our best efforts upon urban interests. See now
the appalling consequences! Among our country people
are brutes, and wild beasts, not to say, diabolical fiends.
Here in Louisiana as everywhere else throughout the
United States, there are no definite steps toward the up-
lifting of country people. It is the injustice of Religious,
Educational, and Charity - methods which, having left
him "naked to his enemies," are primarily responsible
for the farmer's neglected condition. Let anyone show
me what recognition our schools show the farmer, the
farmer's wife, or the farmer's child! Is it wonderful that
their souls are dead?39
Time's tragedy is in the aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed;
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judge of the World,
A protest that is also a prophecy.
Oh masters. lords. and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God.
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the commercial infamies.
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
'" Edwin Markham, "How and Why I Wrote 'The Man with the Hoe,'"
Saturday Evening Post, CLXXll, 1899,497-498.
). M.T. Elder, "The Man with the Hoe," Donahoe's Magazine, XLI, 1899,
569-570.
 104 THE ART BULLETIN MARCH 1983 VOLUME LXV NUMBER 1
Far more obstreperous, however, was the cacophony
raised by Markham's opponents who resisted the call to
reform by denying its necessity; and, as Markham had
found pictorial evidence supporting his disputation in
Millet's genre imagery, so too did the poet's adversaries.
Significantly, the majority of the dissenting literature ap-
peared in religious periodicals that had remained forums
propounding an unswervingly positive view of rural
America, both morally and socially. A heated retort fired
at Markham from the Catholic World typifies reaction to
the poem:
It does not appear that Mr. Markham's object is to help
society. He discovers, through the picture, that a terrible
tragedy is going on in the midst of it ... namely the veil-
ing of the light of reason in countless souls tied to the
wheel of labor. But there is no such effect as this on the
masses of mankind. The decree which condemns man to
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labor is the title deed of his dignity. The average field
life the world over is not only not degrading but it
possesses, from the very nature of the environment in
which it is cast, influences that are elevating and refin-
ing. The paganism of modern American life, of which
Mr. Markham is the oracle, often thinks that when one
puts aside the laundered shirt and creased trousers he
puts aside refinement, intelligence, and all delicacy of
sentiment. 40
Clinging to the traditional prosaic-biblical conception of
the rural laborer, the author repudiated Markham's bestial
image of the worker:
Great movements for civil and religious freedom ...
have begun oftener than not with the country folks,
because their heart is close to the great heart of nature
and is attuned to noble and lofty sentiments. He is
honest, is respectful of his neighbor's goods and rights,
is sympathetic with him in need, is not grasping, nor is
he avaricious, but is the embodiment of the golden rule.
41
And, turning to The Angelus (1858) to substantiate his
viewpoint, he countered the disturbing dissonances of
both Millet's painting and Markham's literary interpreta-
tion of it:
It is only fair to Millet to interpret the phenomenon of
the lowest form of French agricultural life by the pic-
ture, The Angelus, in which one sees, as in a kind of
ecstasy, lines like rays of grace connecting the peasants
in the fields with the light of life beyond the grave, the
thought which ennobles labor by making it the passport
.0 Reverend George McDermot, "Markham: A Mischievous Pessimist,"
Catllolic World, LXIX, 1899,690.
.1 lbid., 691.
" Ibid., 692.
4J Ibid .. 693.
to that higher life. Consequently, we put away the
soulless creature of Mr. Markham, ... 42
Resolute in his conviction that Markham was a misguided
agitator insidiously undermining the confidence of the na-
tion, the writer concluded:
How this production [the poem] could have roused so
much excitement is to be explained by its dishonest ap-
peal to the discontent seething in the minds of certain
sections among the working classes. Anything more
mischievous than the dressing up in the stolid face and
shapeless figure of the French laborer ... the needs and
aspirations of American workingmen, can hardly be
conceived. This is hardly fair; it is, in plain truth, a sub-
tle and wicked libel on the skilled and unskilled
workmen who, at the last presidential election, proved
that they stand foremost in political education of all
people.v
Although extensively read, Markham's poem actually
accomplished little in the advancement of social inter-
pretations of Millet's genre paintings here. Consistently,
political statements extracted from The Man with the Hoe
were undercut by equally fervent religious messages
drawn from The Angelus. Religious rejoinders were not
exclusive to Catholic and Protestant periodicals, but also
appeared in popular literature focused upon domestic life
in America. The Woman's Home Companion, for exam-
ple, carried the following argument written by an essayist
who had recently returned from Barbizon where he had
interviewed "Mere Adele," Millet's model for the peasant
woman in The Angelus: 44
The Angelus is labor relieved of its curse when the
slaves of the soil become the children of God. It affords
a direct contradiction to Markham's poem. Here, the
peasant is in his grandeur, living by the soil and the
fruit of hard incessant work, yet infinitely above the
thing he calls "brother to an ox." Mere Adele calls her-
self a child of God. In the picture and out, her type
proclaims that in spite of the long hours of work ... the
toiler can be kept from being brutalized by that voice
from the sky... , If you think hard toil fearfully enslav-
ing and deadening to the senses, go to beautiful Bar-
bizon ... and hear the ringing of the angelus at morning,
noon, and evening, and even though hope has died in
your heart, it will revive and live again.v
Finally, an enterprising poet, Anna Granniss, defeated
Markham with his own technique when she transmuted
his poem into an impossibly sentimental incantation of
.. Adele Marnier, Millet's model, died in 1899, an occurrence that
prompted renewed interest in her biography. Articles concerning "Mere
Adele" can be found in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. March 5, 1899, and
Tile Artist, XXV, 1899, 129-134.
., Edward A. Steiner. "The Woman of the Angelus." Tile Woman's
Home Companion, XXVI, 1899.4.
 CRITICISM OF MILLET IN 19TH·CENTURY AMERICA 105

to the farmer as a class. I did not say the poem was writ-
ten after seeing the American farmer riding rosily on his
reaper.... 47

Suddenly abjuring his earlier stance for rural reform,

Markham attempted to preserve the social currency of his
poem and Millet's painting without violating American
precepts of farm life:

I soon realized that Millet puts before us no chance

toiler, no mere man of the fields. No, this stunned and
stolid peasant is the type of industrial oppression in all
lands.. ,. He might be a man with a needle in a New
York sweat shop, a man with a pick in a West Virginia
coal mine .... 48

Markham's forced modification of his prior argument

14 Boy with Hoe.
marked the ultimate triumph of sentimental readings of
photograph fron-
Downloaded by [University of Reading] at 09:59 03 January 2015

tispiece from Millet's work in America. Regardless of our use, or mis-

Anna J. Granniss,
The Boy with the
Hoe. 1904
America's untainted rural innocence, a concept she per-
sonified by an American child, "the boy with the hoe,"
whose photograph was the frontispiece of her verse (Fig.
14):
Pleased with the few bright summers of his life,
He takes the hoe and proudly plays the man;
The world's great hope is shining in his eyes,
Whence comes the smile that plays upon his lips?
What means the light that breaks upon his face?
Why does he quicken to the influence of beauty and
sweet sound?46
use, of Millet's genre paintings, they had served
Americans well throughout the nineteenth century as
vehicles for the development of a national self-image of
wealth, charity, political tolerance, industrial progress,
and even artistic sensibility. Only to a small sensitive
minority did they mirror the national trauma of the post-
Civil War decades. Although attempts had been made to
foster social criticism predicated upon Millet's imagery,
these efforts were consistently forestalled by a far stronger
current of sentimentality and the confident, optimistic
view of American life it engendered.
Memphis State University
Memphis, TN 38152

The outpouring of sentimental-religious salvos attack-

ing Markham's poem clearly evinces the continued
strength of a critical and social attitude that had flourished
here before the Civil War and was appended to Millet's
paintings. America's obdurate belief that its rural ills, if
extant at all, could be cured by the farmer's sufficient faith
in God, brought such powerful pressure upon Markham
that he was forced to repudiate his own position.
Retreating from associations between the French and
American rural populace, he wrote an apologia to his
poem in 1900 pointedly entitled "Labor Hopeless and
Hopeful" in which he defensively stated:

The hoeman in my poem does not mean any man with a

hoe. Thoreau hoed his own field. He says that when his
hoe struck against the stones the music echoed in the •• Anna T. Granniss, The Boy with the Hoe, Hartford, 1904, n.p.
woods and sky, and was an accompaniment to his labor 47 Edwin Markham, "Labor: Hopeless and Hopeful:' The Independent,
that yielded an instant but unmeasurable crop. I did not L11, 1900, 353.
mean Thoreau. The hoeman in my poem does not refer •• Ibid., 354.