JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
few admirers and was finally sold for 2000 francs. It is not recorded how it came to pass that the Pope about this time ordered from Millet an Immaculate Conception for his state railway carriage. The work is not now known; but Sensier tells us that in it Millet in no way changed his manner and that he took for his type "a very young country girl with gentle luminous eyes, a broad brow covered with bunches of hair, her mouth open like a creature amazed at the mystery that is within her."
In 1859 Millet exhibited his famous Angelus which was far from making the success that it afterwards achieved, and which was purchased a little later by the Belgian minister Van Präet. The whole world is acquainted with this famous picture; incredible advances in price and millions of reproductions have declared its universal popularity. An exaggerated reaction has now set in against the perhaps excessive enthusiasm aroused by it. Critics are attacking the faults of the composition such as the too high horizon, the stiffness of the figures, the basket in the foreground serving to mask an empty space in front of a wheelbarrow. People are right when they
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