JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
success, to engage in paths remote from his real vocation. Then he perceived that he was going the wrong way and consented to remain within the limits of his nature, never, however, relaxing his efforts to improve every part of his artistic domain and to penetrate more deeply into the spirit of the things and beings that he observed.
Let us endeavour to sum up this evolution. His first works have not been preserved to us, but the choice of subjects and the reminiscences left by contemporaries testify clearly to the unity of his life. From his very beginning as a painter his two sources of inspiration, his two models, are the natural scenes of daily life and the Scriptures. One of his earliest drawings represents an old man bent double, broken by age and sufferings. Of the two drawings which he brought to the Cherbourg teacher, one was an illustration of St Luke and one a pastoral scene. Under Delaroche he conscientiously applied himself to draw from the Holy Family of Francis the First and from the antique; but beneath the academic garb that he assumed, his heavy and violent peasant temperament was always
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