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for JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET (ATTR.)
JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET (ATTR.)
1814-1875
(1814-1875).
French painter. Millet was born at Grouchy, near Gréville, Normandy, of peasant stock, and spent his early years as a farmworker alongside his father. In 1832 he went to Cherbourg to study painting under Langlois, a pupil of Gros, and in 1837 moved to Paris where he trained under the history painter Paul Delaroche. His early works were anecdotal genre, history, and portraits but he met with little success. In 1848 he exhibited the first of his peasant subjects The Winnower (London, NG) and in 1849 moved to Barbizon, near the forest of Fontainebleau, with his wife and children. Inspired by his own childhood experiences, the daily life of the local peasantry, which he shared, and influenced by Honoré Daumier's unsentimentalized paintings of the poor, Millet now began to specialize in the scenes of rustic life on which his reputation rests. The Sower (1850; Paris, Louvre), which owes a considerable debt to Daumier, revealed his ability to elevate the mundane to the heroic and the specific to the general. Major works of the 1850s include The Gleaners (1857; Paris, Louvre), in which the bending figures are set against a flat and muddy landscape, and The Angelus (1859; Paris, Louvre), the painting which both made and broke his reputation. Although not widely known until the 1860s, The Angelus was to become one of the most widely reproduced of all 19th-century paintings; a study of noble peasant piety, it had a wide appeal to the comfortable bourgeois public and ameliorated Millet's reputation for socialism. It is, however, undoubtedly sentimental if not positively sanctimonious, a criticism made by Baudelaire in reviewing another painting of 1859, The Cowgirl (Bourg-en-Bresse, Mus. de l'Ain), and was largely responsible for the eclipse of his career after his death when Victorian sentiment was derided. Although Millet's work was much admired by fellow artists for nobility of subject, composition, and colour, public acclaim came late, in 1867 when nine of his major paintings were shown in the Paris Exposition Universelle, and much of his career was spent in extreme poverty. Towards the end of his life, encouraged by his friend the Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau, he painted a number of pure landscapes. His reputation has been reassessed in recent years but is still controversial. He undoubtably influenced European realism and his drawings, spare and monumental, were important to van Gogh, but he is still accused of romanticizing the grinding harshness of rural poverty which, ironically, for much of his life he shared.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Murphy, A., Jean-François Millet (1984).
David Rodgers
© Oxford University Press 2007
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