Millet2022

“Millet and other mid-nineteenth-century French artists were working at a time of dramatic social change, when the world of tomorrow would never again bear the same relation to yesterday. . . . Millet, like others, could choose between recording a dissolving present and attempting to express a concept of the timeless; he chose to combine both themes as he commented on contemporary life. . . . Millet painstakingly reinvented academic technique: first in the realistic portrayal of farm and village workers in the changing, fragile countryside of central France; then in the last decade of his career, in an astonishing series of landscapes that balance line and color in ways never before seen in French art.” Alexandra Murphy. Jean-François Millet— Drawn into the Light . Yale University Press, 1999.