Studies in pictures; an introduction to the famous galleries . re painters,^hough they did scenes from intimate life unmistakenly genre in character. After a longperiod of viewing the peasant with indifference the]>ublic gradually awakened to the fact that he wasreally quite picturesque, and Millets Sowers, , and Woodsmen came into popular favor. Ofcourse when the subject proved attractive there werej)lenty of painters to adojjt it. As a result tlie peas-antry of France has crowded the walls of the Salonsfor the last thirty years. Bastien-Lepage was oneof the best of the
Studies in pictures; an introduction to the famous galleries . re painters,^hough they did scenes from intimate life unmistakenly genre in character. After a longperiod of viewing the peasant with indifference the]>ublic gradually awakened to the fact that he wasreally quite picturesque, and Millets Sowers, , and Woodsmen came into popular favor. Ofcourse when the subject proved attractive there werej)lenty of painters to adojjt it. As a result tlie peas-antry of France has crowded the walls of the Salonsfor the last thirty years. Bastien-Lepage was oneof the best of the younger men, and LHermitte,Lerolle, Dagnan-Bouveret have all produced a goodquality of peasant genre, but always with some re-minder of figure painting about it. This is true of the military genre of Meissonier(Plate 31). It is figure painting in the little; his-torical work on a microscopic scale. No doubt Meis-sonier got much of his initiative from such Dutch-men as Terburg and Dou. He liked their technique,but not their subject. He cared little for humble. XXXI.—MEISSONlER, The Sergeants Portrait. GENRE PAINTING 107 life, and never painted boors or kitchen interiors orpots and pans, preferring the courtier in powderedwig, the soldier in his uniform, the scholar sur-rounded by his library. For these fine figures herather sacrificed the rest of his picture, which is thereason for saying he was a figure painter in on he gave the proof of this in his Napoleonicbattle pictures, which are historical pictures, and yetare little larger in size than his other works. Every-thing he did was diminutive in scale. He saw theworld through the small end of an opera-glass, andwas a painter great in little things. Whistler used tosneer at him and call his pictures snuff-box paint-ing ; but they were more than that. He was a finecraiteman, but perhaps not a great artist. There were a number of painters who followedMeissonier in the military genre; and a still largerbody who acce
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