Roll, Cormon, or even academicians of the commonplace
type of Bouguereau. Still the art traditions and the great
technical eminence of France did not fail to assert them-
selves. It will perhaps be regarded as surprising even to-day
that it was a grey realist like Bastien-Lepage whom the
young Norsemen admired particularly, and that corypheuses
of the Salon like Carolus Durand, Roll, and Cazin counted
votaries among them side by side with or even before Manet,
Renoir, and the impressionists. One must, however, take
into account the inexperience of the youthful painters, their
German prepossessions, and as well the prejudice with which
even official France received its own true pioneers in art.
Daumier's painting was still unknown; the inspired talent
of Delacroix was by reason of its romantic subject matter
precluded from the interest of the juvenile naturalists;
Manet was just in process of breaking his own path, and
Renoir was too much of a Frenchman for the Northern
students or else a total stranger to them. None the less,
the seeds scattered by genius were budding all about them
or flying like motes through the air. Deep is the soil of
culture in France and plentiful the increase. And art life
in Paris had seasonable weather for its thriving during those
good years.

One French artist there was, nevertheless, who had a
direct influence upon the young Norwegians through the
range of his subjects, his straightforward style, and his
great heart--the painter of peasants, Millet. Here was a
delineation of the life of the people and an art of the
peasantry totally different from Tidemand's Sunday idylls.
Millet's achievement was that of seeing men at their work
and in contact with the soil from which they sprang. There-
by a suggestion of the eternal came into art which was not
there before. It was not the peasant for his own sake and
his rural occupations that this master sought to portray,
though he depicted all of these occupations--the labors of
the fields and of the woods, the life of herdsmen, tillage
and housework--but he did seek to portray man in concord
with his toil, as he expresses it himself. Herein Millet saw

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