Page:François-Millet.djvu/42

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JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

the Scriptures for allusions to his own thoughts or state, and translated these into pictures. In 1846 he expressed the evil attractions of Paris in a Temptation of Saint Jerome. In 1848 his exile from his mother and his kin inspired a Babylonish Captivity and a Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert. In 1851, racked by the thought of his mother, ill and far away, who "did not know either how to live or how to die, so greatly did she long to see him again," and was to die without having seen him because he had not money enough for the journey from Paris to Greville in Normandy, he painted Tobias and his Wife waiting, in the hope of their son's return. In this way he continued to mingle the Scriptures with his life. According to Burty, he had a scheme of "taking up, like Rembrandt, but from a French point of view, the interpretation of the Bible." In this department he confined himself to some attempts, such as Ruth and Boaz, and if in these he was not particularly successful, the reason is that his realistic genius lacked the poetic invention necessary to evoke scenes for which nature did not afford him models; he was closely bound to what he saw; but into

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