JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
painter[1] and his "melancholy women with their slender legs, their feet bruised in high heeled shoes, their waists diminished by stays, their useless hands and bloodless bosoms.[2] Boucher is nothing but an allurer." He is not disarmed even by Watteau who seems to him mournful. With a singular psychological penetration (which I have noted already in what he says of Decamps), Millet discovers the genuinely morbid and sad temperament of Watteau beneath the disguises of Fêtes galantes. He sees the "hidden melancholy of these theatrical puppets who are condemned to laugh." They remind him of marionettes, and he imagines that "all this little company was going to be put back into the box when the show was over, and weep there over its fate." He has a certain taste for some of Murillo's
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- ↑ "What do you expect Boucher to put on the canvas? What he has in his imagination; and what can there be in the imagination of a man who spends his life with women of the lowest stamp." (Diderot.)
- ↑ "Our clothing depraves form. Our legs are cut by garters; the bodies of our women are stifled by bodices, our feet are disfigured by narrow hard shoes." (Diderot.)
