Jean-François Millet
The painter of peasants.
Millet painted peasants sowing, gleaning and praying at Barbizon. His labourers have a monumental dignity.
Jean-François Millet was born in 1814 in the village of Gruchy in Normandy, into a peasant family. As a young man he worked on the farm and came to know peasant life from the inside. He was taught painting in Cherbourg and in 1837 received a grant from the town to study in Paris under the history painter Paul Delaroche. He was unhappy in the big city and for a long time made a living from portraits and small, pleasing pictures.
His first wife died in 1844. He then married Catherine Lemaire, and they had nine children. The family lived in poverty for many years. In 1848 he exhibited The Winnower at the Salon. The picture of a peasant sifting grain was his first success. The painting is in the National Gallery in London. The following year the family moved to the village of Barbizon on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, to escape the cholera in Paris. He lived there for the rest of his life.
At Barbizon he painted his best-known pictures. The Sower (1850) in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston shows a peasant striding across a field scattering seed. The Gleaners (1857) in the Musée d'Orsay shows three poor women picking up the ears of grain left after the harvest. The Angelus (1857–59), also in the Musée d'Orsay, shows a couple pausing in their work to pray as the church bell rings.
Millet painted the peasants with gravity and dignity. The figures are heavy and simple, almost like sculptures, and the colours earthy. Many members of the bourgeoisie saw the pictures as politically dangerous, a defence of the poor. He himself said he only wanted to depict the life he knew. He was also an outstanding draughtsman in pastel and chalk.
Recognition came late. Millet died at Barbizon in 1875. After his death The Angelus became one of the most famous paintings in the world and sold for enormous sums. Van Gogh admired him deeply and copied many of his subjects, and Salvador Dalí was obsessed with The Angelus.