Biography

Jean-François Millet was a French artist well known for the paintings he produced of peasant farmers.

Best known for his oils, Millet is also noted for his etchings, Conté crayon drawings and pastels. He was one of the artists associated with the Barbizon School in the French countryside, and his work is closely connected with the art movement known as Realism. Towards the end of Millet's career, he focused increasingly on pure landscapes, but he remains best known for his powerful images of peasant life and rural labour.

Life and work

Millet's father was Jean-Louis-Nicolas Millet and his mother was Aimée-Henriette-Adélaïde Henry Millet. His parents were members of Gruchy's farming community. Under the guidance of two village priests, he acquired a knowledge of modern authors and Latin. But soon Millet, who was the eldest son, had to help his parents with the farm work.

As a result, he was familiar with many kinds of agricultural labour, including sowing, ploughing, spreading manure, winnowing, threshing, binding sheaves and making hay. These motifs returned throughout his later work, especially in paintings such as The Sower, The Gleaners and other scenes of work and labour.

In 1833, he was sent by his father to study at Cherbourg with Bon Du Mouchel, a portrait painter. By 1835, Millet was studying with French historical painter and Baron Gros' pupil Théophile Langlois de Chèvreville in Cherbourg. In 1837, Millet moved to Paris after receiving a stipend from Langlois and others.

Here, Millet studied with Paul Delaroche at the influential art school École des Beaux-Arts. Millet's scholarship was terminated in 1839; the same year, the jury of the Paris Salon rejected his first submission.

Paris

In 1840, Millet's portrait painting was accepted at the Paris Salon. He then went back to Cherbourg to start a career as a professional portrait painter. However, Millet married Pauline-Virginie Ono in 1841, and the couple moved to Paris, France. After rejection at the 1843 Salon and his wife's death in April 1844 due to tuberculosis, Millet went back to Cherbourg.

In 1845, he moved to the urban French commune and city of Le Havre with a woman called Catherine Lemaire. In 1853, the two married in a civil ceremony and went on to have nine children. While in Le Havre, Millet painted small genre pieces and portraits for several months, before returning to Paris. His portrait work is now a useful part of understanding the wider range of his career, and is covered in more detail on the Millet portraits page.

In the mid-1840s, while he was still in Paris, he befriended Théodore Rousseau, Charles Jacque, Narcisse Diaz and Constant Troyon, artists who, like him, would become linked to the Barbizon School. He also befriended French painter and printmaker Honoré Daumier, whose draughtsmanship influenced Millet's subsequent use of peasant subjects, and the French art historian Alfred Sensier, who became his lifelong supporter.

Millet's first Salon success came in 1847. In 1848, the government purchased his Winnower. At that time, his most ambitious work was Babylonian Captivity, which he unveiled at the 1848 Salon; however, it was scorned by the public and critics. Shortly afterwards, the painting disappeared, which led some historians to believe that Millet decided to destroy it.

In 1984, scientists at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, x-rayed The Young Shepherdess by Millet to look for minor changes. They discovered it was painted over Captivity. It is believed that the painter reused the canvas during the Franco-German War, which led to a shortage of materials.

Barbizon

In 1849, the painter produced Harvesters, which was commissioned by the state. In June of the same year, Millet moved to Barbizon with his family. In 1850, he entered into an agreement with Alfred Sensier, who provided him with money and materials in return for paintings and drawings.

Millet was also free to sell his work to other buyers. At the Salon of 1850, Millet exhibited Haymakers and The Sower, the first major masterpiece by the artist, as well as the earliest of the famous trio of works that included The Angelus and The Gleaners.

From 1850 to 1853, he worked on Harvesters Resting, a painting that Millet worked on for a long period and considered one of his most important works. Conceived to rival his two heroes, Poussin and Michelangelo, this painting also marked Millet's transition from symbolic imagery of peasant life to the depiction of contemporary social conditions.

Harvesters Resting was the only painting that Millet ever dated, and the first work that garnered him official recognition at the 1853 Salon, where he was awarded a second-class medal. In the mid-1850s, he executed several etchings of peasant subjects, including Woman Carding Wool and Man with a Wheelbarrow. These works connect closely with the wider themes gathered on the Jean-François Millet paintings hub.

Later years

Despite the mixed reviews that Millet's paintings received at the Paris Salon, his reputation and success continued growing through the 1860s. Millet was hired to produce 25 paintings over three years in early 1860. In 1865, Emile Gavet started commissioning Millet's pastels; this collection eventually included 90 paintings.

The International Exposition of 1867 hosted a major exhibition of Millet's work. The exhibited works included Potato Planters, The Angelus and The Gleaners. In 1868, Frédéric Hartmann commissioned the painting Four Seasons, and Millet was later named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the highest order of merit for civil and military achievement in France, established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802.

In 1870, he was appointed to the jury of the Salon. Later that year, Millet, Lemaire and their children fled the Franco-German War. They moved to Cherbourg and later to Gréville. In 1871, he returned to Barbizon with his family. The last years of Millet's life were marked by increased official recognition and financial success, but he could not fulfil government commissions as a result of failing health. Millet married Lemaire in a religious ceremony on 3 January 1875 and died on 20 January of the same month.

Legacy

Millet's late landscapes served as important points of reference, both structurally and symbolically, for the Normandy coastal paintings later produced by Claude Monet. His wider legacy, however, rests above all on his treatment of rural labour, seen most clearly in The Gleaners, The Sower and Man with a Hoe.

Millet's painting The Angelus, an oil painting executed between 1857 and 1859, was widely reproduced in the 19th and 20th centuries. Salvador Dalí, a Spanish Surrealist artist, was fascinated by this painting and wrote an analysis of it.

Instead of seeing the painting as a composition of spiritual peace, Dalí believed that the work contained messages of repressed sexual aggression. He also suggested that the two figures in the painting were praying over their dead child, rather than simply reciting the Angelus prayer. An X-ray of the canvas was later carried out to investigate these claims. The painting contains a painted-over geometric, coffin-like shape.

However, it is not clear whether the shape is a coffin or whether Millet simply changed his mind about the composition and meaning of The Angelus. Lastly, Millet was an important source of inspiration for the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, especially during Van Gogh's early period. This influence is particularly clear in Van Gogh's interest in sowers, diggers, peasants and the moral seriousness of rural life.

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