Millet2022

Millet – A Summary of His Life and Work Cora Michael

Among the great Realist artists of the nineteenth century, Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) was the peasant painter par excellence . His obituary summed up his life’s achievements as well as his nature thus: “. . . he was the son of a peasant, lived the greater part of his life amongst the peasant class, and was accustomed to dress usually as if his only occupation was to tend the sheepfold and help in the garnering of the harvest.” 1 Millet himself put it more succinctly: “Peasant I was born and peasant I will die.” 2 Indeed, no one is more closely connected to the theme of rural workers than Millet, whose upbringing endowed him with a deeper and more intimate understanding of this class of people than any artist of his day. His representations of sturdy peasants and their humble labors— gleaners, goose girls, sheep shearers and shepherds, among others—had an enormous influence on many of the vanguard artists that followed, including Camille Pissarro, Vincent Van Gogh, and Salvador Dalí. Unlike the Salon painters Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884) and Jules Breton (1827–1906), Millet never indulged in sentimental or sexualized depictions of his peasant subjects. At the same time, he did not shy away from the brutal and often degrading realities of their lives, as seen most famously in the hunched female figures of The Gleaners and the mute, exhausted male farmer in Man with a Hoe . This may be partly explained by Millet’s background but also by his admiration for the monumental figures of Michelangelo and the folk simplicity of the Le Nain 3 — taken together and filtered through his own artistic personality— resulting in a timeless and exalted representation of his subjects. While peasant themes formed the core of Millet’s oeuvre, his art was in fact quite diverse and eclectic in both subject matter and media, comprising portraits, nudes, and landscapes in paintings, drawings, and prints.

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