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That is what happens in art once in so often.

The Barbizon school was a studio school. It walked the streets and the fields; it looked at men and women at work and at play, but when it came to paint it did not paint outdoors with object and easel in close contact; it retired within its doors and transformed life and nature as great romantic story-tellers translate their impressions into fairy-tales and romances.

It seems a far cry from Millet to Chabaud but in some aspects of their attitude toward art they are nearly akin. Between the two there intervened Impressionism, that is all. Millet painted labor. And what is the painting by Chabaud, “The Laborer,” but a more elemental Millet? It lacks the romantic, the poetic qualities of Millet’s “Labor,” for instance, or his “Sower”—paintings famous in prints and reproductions, but it is none the less a vivid representation of labor.

To the admirers of Millet it may seem sacrilegious to even mention Chabaud in comparison, but, confining our attention to the one painting reproduced herein, there is no question that in its elemental strength, its simplicity, it possesses a quality, a certain bald dramatic quality that Millet lacks, though Millet’s “Sower” may possess qualities you like more.