Jean-François Millet

gigatos | May 29, 2022

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Summary

Jean-François Millet (January 20, 1875) was a French realist painter who was born into a peasant family. He trained with a local painter in Cherbourg and then studied in Paris in 1837 with Delaroche. Influenced by Daumier, he worked in a pastoral style with socialist touches that he further developed in the village of Barbizon, in the forest of Fontainebleau, where he settled in 1849 with Theodore Rousseau, Narcisse Diaz and others. The members of this group, known as the Barbizon School and influenced by Corot, the 17th century Dutch landscape painters and Constable, were the forerunners of Impressionism. He stands out for his scenes of farmers, where he wants to express the innocence of the peasant man in contrast to the degradation that accompanies the citizen immersed in the industrial society. He is included in the realist and naturalist movements. He died in Barbizon in 1875.

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Youth from 1830-1840

Millet was the first-born French realist painter of Jean-Louis-Nicolas and Aimée-Henriette-Adélaïde Henry Millet, members of the peasant community in the village of Gruchy, commune of Gréville-Hague, Normandy. Under the guidance of two village priests, Millet learned Latin and modern authors, before being sent to Cherbourg in 1833 to study with a portrait painter named Paul Dumouchel. By 1835 he was studying full-time with Lucien-Théophile Langlois, a pupil of Baron Gros, in Cherbourg. Langlois and others supported him financially so that he could move to Paris in 1837, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts with Paul Delaroche. In 1839 he finished his apprenticeship and the first thing he submitted to the Salon was rejected.

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Parisian life

In 1837, a scholarship allowed Millet to move to Paris where he attended the École des Beaux-Arts. There he perfected his knowledge in the studio of the history painter Paul Delaroche. Later he established friendships with Constant Troyon, Narcisse Diaz, Charles Jacque, and Théodore Rousseau, artists who, like Millet, would be related to the Barbizon school; all of them helped him and played a determining role in his decision to definitively leave that “gloomy and chaotic” city, according to his own words, which had never pleased him; apart from his peasant habits and his rough character, he did not agree with the Parisian way of life and returned to Cherbourg to begin a career as a portrait painter. After 1840 he moved away from the official style of painting and came under the influence of Honoré Daumier, whose figure drawing would influence Millet”s later depictions of peasant subjects, from whom he learned a sense of contrasting light and shade, as well as the construction of the human body, with simplicity of volumes; and Alfred Sensier, a government bureaucrat who would become a lifelong advocate, and in time, the artist”s biographer. In 1847 he had his first success at the Salon, with the painting Oedipus Descending from the Tree, and in 1848 the government bought his Sorcerer.

His well-known beginning was El aventador (1848). In the 1850s he observes the farmers in the democratic years of the Second Republic and is of a melancholic gravity and, above all, of social denunciation (Mujeres cargando leña, 1851), and even in later works such as El Hombre de la azada (1859-1862). This emphasis on pointing out the “sentimental aestheticism of his resigned workers of the land”, gave rise to frequent rejections of his works, which should be reviewed according to Novonty, and try to maintain a correct balance in the valuation of his art.

In 1841 he married Pauline-Virginie Ono, and they moved to Paris. After being rejected at the 1843 Salon and Pauline died of Tuberculosis, Millet returned again to Cherbourg. In 1845 Millet moved to Le Havre with Catherine Lemaire, whom he would marry in a civil ceremony in 1853; they would have nine children, and would remain together for the rest of Millet”s life. In Le Havre he painted portraits and small genre pieces for several months, before returning to Paris.

The Captivity of the Jews in Babylon, Millet”s most ambitious work to date, was exhibited at the 1848 Salon, but was mocked by both critics and the public. The painting ultimately disappeared shortly thereafter, leading historians to believe that Millet destroyed it. In 1984, scientists at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston x-rayed Millet”s 1870 painting entitled “The Young Shepherdess” looking for minor changes, and discovered that it was painted over: The Captivity of the Jews in Babylon. It is now believed that Millet reused the canvas when materials became scarce due to the Franco-Prussian War.

Barbizon School

Term used to refer to a group of painters who, around 1818, gathered in the French village of the same name and its surroundings near the forest of Fontainebleau. It is also known as the School of Fontainebleau and its production is considered the most vigorous current of landscape painting in 19th century France. He elaborates with remarkable precision a painting in the open air, under the meticulous observation of natural environments and rejects the academic and neoclassical composition. Of loose workmanship, they are mostly landscapes of plains, trees and forests. The most representative painters are Jean-Camille Corot, although the organizer, leader of the group and theorist is Theodore Rousseau. Other outstanding figures include Jules Dupré, with a work characterized by the somber use of light, and Jean Francois Millet, a true renovator due to his peculiar subject matter, exalting the world of peasants and rural workers.

In 1849 Millet painted Reapers, a state commission. At the Salon of that year he exhibited Shepherdess Sitting at the Edge of the Forest, a very small oil painting that marked his departure from previous idealized pastoral subjects in favor of a more realistic and personal approach. In June 1849 he arrived in Barbizon, with Catherine and her children, joining the circle of the school that takes its name from this town.

In 1850 Millet reached an agreement with Sensier, who provided the artist with materials and money in exchange for drawings and paintings, with Millet retaining the right to continue selling works to other buyers. At the Salon that year he exhibited Labradors and The Sower, his first major masterpiece and the first of the iconic trio of paintings that would include The Gleaners and The Angelus.

From 1850 to 1853 Millet worked on Reapers at Rest (Ruth and Boaz), a painting he would consider his most important, and the one he worked on the longest. Conceived to rival his heroes: Michelangelo and Poussin, it was also the painting that marked his transition from depicting symbolic imagery of peasant life to that of contemporary social conditions. It was the only painting to which he gave a date, and it was the first work to garner official recognition, a second-class medal at the 1853 Salon.

Millet, like Théodore Rousseau, had a deep sense of nature: he interpreted it (rather than simply reflecting it) by understanding the voices of the earth, the trees or the paths. Millet claimed to feel in nature more than what the senses gave him. The sometimes sentimental tone of his works (The Angelus and Death and the Woodcutter) distances him somewhat from the other great realist, Courbet, rougher and more rebellious.

The author will seek to portray the humble and peasant people in a gesture of admiration for the poor people of the rural world, seducing the republicans and exasperating the bourgeoisie by treating this as a central theme in his work.

The winnower

Before a dramatic interior space, the figure of the winnower sifting the wheat with his feet shod in wide clogs and old rag-like cloths tied with a piece of string over his pants to prevent their deterioration, suffers as a tell-tale image, although, as always in Millet, submissive of poverty and of the hard daily struggle for survival of the humble rural hired worker.

This is one of Millet”s best known paintings, The Gleaners (1857). Walking in the fields around Barbizon a recurring theme appeared in Millet”s pencil and brush for seven years-the gleaning, the centuries-old right of poor women and children to carry away grain left in the fields after the harvest. He found it to be a timeless theme, linked to stories from the Old Testament. In 1857, he presented the painting The Gleaners at the Salon, to a lukewarm, even hostile audience.

(Earlier versions include a vertical composition painted in 1854, an etching of 1855-56 that directly foreshadowed the horizontal format of the painting now in the Musée d”Orsay).

A warm golden light suggests something sacred and eternal in this everyday scene in which the struggle for survival unfolds. During his years of preparatory studies Millet pondered how best to convey the sense of repetition and fatigue in the daily lives of the peasants. The lines drawn on each woman”s back lead to the ground and then repeat themselves in motion identical to their endless and exhausting labor. Along the horizon, the sunset outlines the farm with its abundant heaps of grain, in contrast to the long shadowy figures in the foreground. The simple, dark dresses of the gleaners cut robust shapes against the golden field, giving each woman a noble, monumental strength.

The painting was commissioned by Thomas Gold Appleton, an American art collector residing in Boston, Massachusetts, who had previously studied with Barbizon painter Constant Troyon, a friend of Millet. It was completed during the summer of 1857. Millet added a bell tower and changed the work”s first title, Prayer for the Potato Harvest to The Angelus when the buyer did not pick it up in 1859. First shown to the public in 1865, the painting changed hands several times, increasing in value only modestly, as the artist was considered by some to have suspicious political sympathies. Upon Millet”s death a decade later, a bidding war broke out between the United States and France, ending a few years later with a price of 800,000 gold francs.

The disparity between the apparent value of the painting and the poor state of Millet”s surviving family was a major impetus in the establishment of droit de suite, which was intended to compensate artists or their heirs when their works were resold.

The Angelus, by Jean Francois Millet, was conceived as an exaltation of peasant work, free from the brutalization of the proletariat of the time, and as a hymn to the reconciliation of man with nature. In terms of composition, it obeys a simple scheme: on an open landscape, the painter places the two characters in the foreground, giving them an almost sculptural presence enhanced by a masterful work on the light that accentuates the modeling of both figures. In 1935, Salvador Dalí took this painting as an example of what he called ””critical paranoid method””. According to his interpretation, understandable within a surrealist scheme, the figures are not praying the Angelus, but burying their son, whose body is in the basket in the foreground. His analysis went even further when he compared the female figure to a praying mantis about to devour the male, who waits submissively, hiding his erection with his hat.

Last years

Despite mixed reviews of the paintings he exhibited at the Salon, Millet”s reputation and success grew throughout the 1860s. Early in the decade he was contracted to paint 25 works for a monthly stipend for the next three years, and in 1865 another patron, Émile Gavet, began commissioning pastel works from him for a collection that would eventually reach 90 works. In 1867 the Exposition Universelle hosted a large exhibition of his work, with The Gleaners, The Angelus, and Potato Planters among the paintings on display. The following year Frédéric Hartmann commissioned Four Seasons for 25,000 francs, and Millet was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

In 1870 Millet was elected a juror at the Salon. Later that year, he and his family fled the Franco-Prussian War, moving to Cherbourg and Gréville, and did not return to Barbizon until late 1871. His last years were marked by financial success and increasing official recognition, but he was unable to complete government commissions due to his delicate health. On January 3, 1875, he married Catherine in a religious ceremony. Millet died on January 20, 1875.

Millet was an important source of inspiration for Vincent van Gogh, particularly during his early period. Millet and his work are mentioned many times in Vincent”s letters to his brother Theo. Millet”s late landscapes would serve as influential reference points for Claude Monet”s paintings of the Normandy coast; their structural and symbolic content influenced Georges Seurat as well.

Millet is the main protagonist of Mark Twain”s Is He Dead? (1898), in which he is depicted as a young struggling artist who pretends to be dead in order to achieve fame and fortune. Most of the details about Millet in the play are fiction.

Millet”s painting L”homme à la houe inspired Edwin Markham”s famous poem “The Man With the Hoe” (1898).

The Angelus was frequently reproduced in the 19th and 20th centuries. Salvador Dalí was fascinated by this work, and wrote an analysis of it, The Tragic Myth of Millet”s Angelus. Rather than seeing spiritual peace in the work, Dalí believed it conveyed messages of repressed sexual aggression. Dalí was also of the opinion that the two figures are praying over the grave of their dead child, rather than the Angelus. Dalí was so insistent on this fact that they eventually x-rayed the canvas, confirming his suspicions: the painting contains a geometric shape that was later painted over, much like a coffin. However, it is not known whether Millet changed his mind about the meaning of the painting, including whether that shape is actually a coffin.

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