Jean François Millet was born on October 4, 1814, that is at the period when French art, at any rate as far as landscape painting is concerned, had reached its lowest ebb. Throughout the eighteenth century the landscape painter had been hard put to make a living. The taste of connoisseurs throughout the century had been for portraits and interiors, or for those numerous pastoral subjects which were carried out with so much decorative charm by such men as Watteau and Boucher. Such landscape painting as existed was of the type popularised by Vernet; it was built upon a curious mixture of Italian influence coming from Panini and Salvator Rosa. The only evidence of revolt against such a state of affairs we find in the works of Hubert Robert and Moreau. These two, and more especially would I direct the reader's attention to the latter, struggled hard to break down the conventionalities of the time. They endeavoured to infuse some sense of atmosphere into their pictures, and whilst frequently their trees and figures are painfully formal, they yet stand alone in the French school as the pioneers of a phase of art which was to attain its zenith in the middle of the nineteenth century. But after the Revolution, and during the whole of the time that France was under the domination of Napoleon, very rigid principles indeed were enforced with regard to the direction that art should take. The innovation which had its commencement in the reign of Louis XVI. swept everything before it as it gained force. Classical art and traditions dominated the whole French school, and no artist, however great his reputation, attempted for many years to swim against the stream. In spite of the principles of liberty and equality which were claimed for all under the new _régime_, a terribly strict eye was kept upon any innovations which might break out in the form of a naturalistic art. The directors of this new movement failed to see that the conditions which had produced the great Greek and Roman sculptors had passed away, and that the latter's supremacy was due to the fact that their productions were symbolical of the loftiest thoughts of their own epoch. The art which expresses the ambitions and noblest thoughts of its time will alone endure. These expressions are not applicable to any other condition than those which called them forth, and hence in attempting to purify the rococo which had existed up to the middle of the eighteenth century, by a return to classical traditions, they were only copying that which their predecessors had done, and in so doing left us without any original expression of their own time.