JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
same woolly and monotonous touch."[1] Yet he had a certain curiosity about the shades of stuffs. Wheelwright says that he had in his studio a collection of rags, handkerchiefs, skirts, and blouses, to suggest shades to him. "Blue was his favourite colour." He had innumerable shades of it, "from the crude indigo of the new blouse to the delicate tone of garments that had grown almost white by washing. He revelled in them." But his execution very often remains heavy and uniform; and our contemporary criticism which is but too much inclined to judge painting wholly and solely in respect of colouring has a good case against Millet. Huysmans does not know how to be angry enough with "his monotonous stingy oils, commonplace and rank, false and obliterated," "his rough and scurvy pictures, old and deaf," and "his uniform, russet figures under a hard sky;" and distinguishing the painter in pastels, whom he
- ↑ Sensier gives from one of Millet's letters a list of the colours that he used, which were all the most common earths "3 burnt sienna; 2 raw sienna; 3 Naples yellow; 1 burnt Roman ochre; 2 yellow ochre; 2 burnt umber.
141
