JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
lesson and Millet's judgments that we may believe these principles to have been brought to maturity by the two friends in common, and that both must often have studied Poussin. When for instance Rousseau says: "The picture ought to be made in the first place in our brain. The painter does not make it spring into life on the canvas: he removes one after another the veils which concealed it," do we not seem to hear Poussin saying in his pride of intellect, after conceiving the idea of a picture: "The thought of it has been fixed, and that is the principal thing."
***
One of the natural consequences of Millet's intellectuality is that he was perhaps even greater still in his drawings than in his paintings. He felt himself more at ease in them. To pastels and drawings he gave his best work in the last stage of his life, after 1864. He began by a number of drawings in black chalk dealing with the whole range of peasant life;
172
