Jean-François Millet was a French painter, born in 1814 in a Normandy farming hamlet and dead in Barbizon in 1875, who painted peasants with the weight usually given to saints and kings. His Gleaners and his Angelus are two of the best known French pictures of the nineteenth century. What most people want to know is the story of the Angelus: a small canvas he sold for 1,000 francs, which France later fought to buy back and which Salvador Dalí believed hid a secret.
Millet was a farmer's son who made farm work the subject of his art at a time when Paris still looked at the rural poor with suspicion, and the picture that carried his name furthest began as something else.
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The Angelus was not painted as the Angelus. The American collector Thomas Gold Appleton ordered it from Millet under the title Prayer for the Potato Crop, and when Appleton never came for it, Millet reworked the canvas, added a church steeple and gave it the name it carries today. In 1860 he sold it for 1,000 francs.
It was a small picture, 55 by 66 centimeters, and for years almost nobody saw it. Then, on 1 July 1889, it came up at a sale in Paris, and the Louvre found itself bidding against a group of Americans for the work of a farmer's son who had never been rich.
France wanted it back so badly that the next owner paid 750,000 francs to bring it home. Decades later, Dalí claimed that the couple in the field were not praying at all, and that the picture was hiding something under the paint.
What You'll Discover
Why he left Paris for good.
Who watches from the horse.
What a critic saw in a hoe.
Whose prayer the bell stood for.
Who bid against the Louvre.
What Dalí saw in the field.