Millet2022

Millet was born in 1814 in Gruchy, a rural hamlet near Cherbourg on the Normandy coast. His family were landowning peasants who fostered a love of reading and learning in their young son. Millet studied with the local curate and read deeply on his own, especially Virgil and Homer (in Latin), the Bible, Shakespeare, and contemporary authors like Victor Hugo. In 1833 Millet began his artistic training in Cherbourg with the portrait painter Bon Dumouchel (1807–1846), a former pupil of David who encouraged his student to make copies of Old Masters in the local museum. In 1837, with funds provided by a municipal scholarship, Millet moved to Paris where he spent two years studying at the École des Beaux-Arts with the history painter Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), who described Millet as “dangerous” owing to his refusal to submit to Academic conventions. After a brief period back in Normandy, Millet returned to Paris in 1845 and earned a modest living as a painter of portraits and nudes. Some of these early drawings, such as Nu de dos courbé vers la gauche (cat. no. 1) offer a glimpse of his developing Realist approach to the figure: solidly modeled and without mythological scaffolding, the artist makes no effort to sanitize or perfect the forms of the female body but instead treats them with sensitivity and forthrightness. Millet turned to peasant subjects with conviction in the late 1840s, remarking to his friend and patron, Alfred Sensier, that these works “suit my temperament best; for I must confess, even if you think me a socialist, that the human side of art is what touches me most.” 4 Beginning in 1850 Millet exhibited a series of major canvases at the Salon, beginning with The Sower and followed by Harvesters Resting in 1853, The Gleaners in 1857, Sheepshearing in 1861, and Man with a Hoe in 1863. Critical response to his work was deeply polarized. Some praised the honesty of his portrayals of rural laborers while others decried the perceived radicalism thereof, not to mention the rough-hewn quality of his paint. The writer Théophile Gauthier likened this quality of impasto to “the earth itself,” which Millet took as a 6