The sibylline city of Boston has had many points to make over the years. One of the less urgent but more interesting she has made of late concerns the French painter Jean-François Millet. Millet has hardly been forgotten, but for a man of his talents he has—according to Boston—been rather neglected. This pains the old dame because ever since her most eloquent reforming days in the last century she’s had a crush on the French painter, who was as refined and as democratic as herself. This year—in a somewhat possessive, matronish way—the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has decided to rectify this lamentable situation with a big exhibition in its new Gund Gallery. The show, organized by Alexandra R. Murphy, curator of European painting, offers pictures from every period of Millet’s career, including many paintings, prints, and drawings originally collected by those notable Bostonians who were among the first to admire the “peasant painter of Barbizon.”[1]

In the middle of the last century, Barbizon (whose curious, tonsorial-sounding name is now borne by hotels and health salons, modeling agencies and foundation garments) was still an all-but-unknown village just outside the Forest of Fontainebleau on the Chailly plain. Through this village ran a cobblestoned street lined with one-story thatched cottages overgrown with lichens and moss. There was no market (you went marketing in Chailly) and few of the cottages had wooden floors. On three sides the wheatfields stretched away, but on the west side, if you had a mind