Jean-Francois Millet: The Complete Story
Jean-Francois Millet was the French painter who made peasants heroic. At a time when serious art meant gods and kings, he painted farm workers stooping in the fields with the gravity of saints. The Gleaners and The Angelus turned hard rural labor into something monumental, and a little dangerous.
To paint the poor at this scale, with this dignity, was almost a political act. Critics smelled socialism. Van Gogh saw a hero.
Born: Gruchy, Normandy, 1814, into a farming family
Known for: dignified peasant scenes, the Barbizon school
Died: Barbizon, France, 1875
The dignity of work
Millet grew up among farmers and never forgot it. He settled in the village of Barbizon, near the forest of Fontainebleau, with a group of painters who turned away from the city to paint nature and country life directly.
His figures are solid, weary and noble. In The Gleaners, three women bend to gather leftover grain, the poorest work in the field, painted with the seriousness usually reserved for history painting. See what is Realism art.
The Angelus and the politics
His most famous work, The Angelus, shows two peasants pausing in a field to pray at the sound of the church bell. It became one of the most reproduced images of the 19th century, printed on countless walls and objects.
Some viewers found his dignified poor inspiring. Others, in a nervous age of revolutions, found them threatening, reading socialism into the sympathy he showed for rural labor.
The painter who shaped Van Gogh
No artist mattered more to Vincent van Gogh than Millet. Van Gogh copied his peasant scenes again and again to learn, and treated him almost as a spiritual father. That deep debt is explored in the paid feature how Millet shaped Van Gogh.
Through Van Gogh, Millet's vision of labor and landscape flowed straight into modern art.
What people ask about Millet
What is Jean-Francois Millet famous for?
Dignified paintings of peasants, above all The Gleaners and The Angelus.
Was he political?
He insisted he simply painted what he knew, but critics read radical sympathy into his work.
Who did he influence?
Van Gogh above all. See also landscape painting.
Why the bowed back still carries weight
Millet insisted that ordinary working people deserved the grandest treatment in art, and changed who painting was allowed to be about. The bowed back in a field has carried weight ever since. Read his line to Van Gogh in the complete Van Gogh story.
In 1889 The Angelus sold for a record sum after a bidding war between France and America, and a later owner seriously proposed slicing the canvas to check a theory that Millet first painted a small coffin where the basket now sits.