French Painter Jean-François Millet

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Mary Tompkins Lewis, Peasants and Paintings; An exhibition highlights Jean-François Millet's scenes of rural labor. Wall Street Journal, Aug 28, 2025, at page A11.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... -paintings-bade011b

Excerpt in the window of print: The artist brought a clear but often sympathetic eye to his subjects.

Note:
(a)
(i) This is exhibition review on
Millet: Life on the Land. London: National Gallery, Aug 7 - Oct 19, 2025.
https://www.nationalgallery.org. ... et-life-on-the-land
• Not to be confused with National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, United States.
• This review only displays two paintings in print: The Sower (described in (c)(i) below) and The Wood Sawyers (described in (c)(vi) below,
(ii) Millet: Life on the Land. London: National Gallery, Aug 7 - Oct 19, 2025.
https://www.nationalgallery.org. ... et-life-on-the-land
("The first UK exhibition in nearly 50 years dedicated to Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) * * * The show will coincide with the 150th anniversary of Millet's death – by which time his works were well known in the UK * * * Millet: Life on the Land will present around 13 paintings and drawings from British public collections. It will include the National Gallery's The Winnower (about 1847‒8), and the exceptional loan of 'L’Angelus' (1859) from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.   The exhibition will range from Millet’s last years in Paris through to his images of workers on the land during the 1850s following his move to the village of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau Forest in 1849, when he became one of the most significant painters associated with the 19th-century Barbizon school*. Two drawings of shepherdesses from the Cooper Gallery (Barnsley Museums - BMBC) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) will be shown together for the first time. * * * While Millet’s own political convictions are unclear, many critics appropriated his work for their own progressive agenda while others labelled him as subversive. Yet there is no doubt that he had sympathy with the workers around him and wrote in 1851 of the 'human side' that touched him most.")
(A) Jean-François Millet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-François_Millet
(realism; section 1 Life and work: Paris (1841-1849); followed by Barbizon (1849- ) )

This Wiki page does not expressly say when, but the Web says he lived in Barbizon until he died in 1875. He rented ahouse there, which is now
Millet Studio Museum (in English) and Musée Millet (in French).
• Millet Studio Museum. Millet Studio Museum. Fontainebleau Tourisme, undated.
https://www.fontainebleau-touris ... llet-studio-museum/
• Barbizon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbizon
(" a commune (town) in the Seine-et-Marne department in north-central France. It is located near the Fontainebleau Forest")
(B) The Winnower. National Gallery, undated.
https://www.nationalgallery.org. ... millet-the-winnower
(C) L'Angelus. Musée d'Orsay, undated.
https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/langelus-345


(b) French-English dictionary:
* The French noun masculine
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ang%C3%A9lus
was borrowed directly from Latin noun masculine angelus, which in turn came from Ancient Greek ἄγγελος (romanization: ángelos), all meaning angel.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/angelus
   ^ Modern French has noun masculine ange to mean angel.
   https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ange
   ^ French articles and determiners
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_articles_and_determiners
   (section 1 Articles, section 1.1 Definite article: table)


(c) " 'The Sower' (1857-48, Museum Wales) * * * was inspired by the peasant paintings of Peter Bruegel the Elder * * * [The Winnower was sold to republic minister] who may have admired both iys trenchant working-class subject and tricolor palette. * * * 'Wood Choppers' (c 1850, National Galleries of Scotland) and Millet's animated sketch of 'Two Peasants Sawing and Splitting Wood' (c 1850-51; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) * * * 'The Wood Sawyers' (1850-52, Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

(i) Millet had several versions of The Sower.
(A) This particular painting is
The Sower. Amgueddfa Cymru-Museum Wales, undated
https://museum.wales/art/online/?action=show_item&item=1324
(B) Welch-English dictionary:
* Cymru (noun feminine; proper name): "Wales"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cymru
(C) compare
The Sower. Millet, 1850. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, undated.
https://collections.mfa.org/objects/31601
(ii) Peter Bruegel the Elder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder
(c 1525–1530 – 1569; Dutch; section 7 Selected works: "Parable of the Sower, 1557, Timken Museum of Art pa private, non-profit organization founded in part by Timken family], San Diego")
(iii) English dictionary:
* trenchant (adjective; did You Know?)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trenchant
(iv) Wood Chopper. National Galleries of Scotland, undated
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/19676
(v) Two Peasants Sawing and Splitting Wood. Ashmolean Museum, undated.
https://images.ashmolean.org/sea ... +and+Splitting+Wood
(vi) The Wood Sawyers. Victoria and Albert Museum, undated.
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/it ... jean-fran%C3%A7ois/


----------------------WSJ
London
The critical fortunes of paintings of peasants by the Realist artist Jean-François Millet (1814-75) rose and fell with the tides of revolution and social unrest in his native France. But they would enjoy a stable fate in 19th-century Britain. “Millet: Life on the Land,” an intimate, highly absorbing exhibition at the National Gallery drawn almost exclusively from U.K. museums, offers an insightful view of the extraordinary esteem in which British collectors—and especially those from Scotland—have long held Millet’s work. Organized by Sarah Herring, the associate curator of post-1800 paintings, it is the first show in the U.K. in almost 50 years devoted to the artist and is timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of his death.

The foremost French painter of rural laborers in an increasingly industrial age that saw this distinctive and evocative genre flourish, Millet was the son of a prosperous Norman farmer, but a talent for drawing would set him on a different path. “The Sower” (1847-48, Museum Wales) is the first version of a theme he would explore repeatedly, and was inspired by the peasant paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Northern Renaissance artist whose work he admired. Millet’s tentative figure, marked by finely delineated features that render his individuality, is dwarfed by the composition’s high horizon and threatened by scavenging birds behind him. Unlike the painter’s later images of colossal workers flinging seeds across crow-covered fields—whose shadowed faces and muscular physiques made them archetypes of the agrarian proletariat or, in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, of a menacing rural underclass—Millet’s early laborer falters at his humble task. The painter’s refusal to idealize such widely varied images of peasant laborers established Millet’s Realist bona fides, but his sympathies for their plight often seemed to linger below the surface.

This deftly conceived, beautifully researched exhibition was inspired by “The Winnower” (c. 1847-48), which the National Gallery acquired in 1978.  Its subject—Millet’s first large-scale image of a laborer—wears a tattered, blue worker’s apron, crude clogs stuffed with straw (for warmth) and a bright red scarf. He is probably a low-ranking, landless agricultural worker hired after the harvest for meager compensation. The work was acclaimed at the 1848 Paris Salon, critics marveling at the rough-hewn image’s ethereal painterly effects. Shimmering dots of pigment convey the fine gold and gray dust that hovers in the air as the winnower shakes his wicker basket to separate wheat from chaff—obscuring our view of the canvas’s deeper, shadowy space and framing its rugged protagonist. Within days of the abdication, in February 1848, of King Louis-Philippe, the painting was sold to a minister in the new republican French government who may have admired both its trenchant working-class subject and tricolor palette.

A handful of sketches produced in Barbizon, a bucolic artists’ colony in the Fontainebleau forest where Millet moved with his family in 1849, suggest that his later, strikingly authentic scenes of backbreaking rural labor were shaped in part by studies of living models, some captured unposed as they worked in their wooded environs. Though Millet disliked painting outdoors and was long thought to have worked largely from memory, he is also known to have cut a hole in the wall of his spare cottage to contemplate the forested landscape and its workers from afar.

Such vibrant works as the black chalk and watercolor drawing of laborers viewed at a distance in his “Wood Choppers” (c. 1850, National Galleries of Scotland) and Millet’s animated sketch of “Two Peasants Sawing and Splitting Wood” (c. 1850-51, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)—in which one, a gaunt, wiry figure wields a crude, club-like ax—would inform his masterly Barbizon canvas “The Wood Sawyers” (1850-52, Victoria and Albert Museum, London). In it, Millet’s faceless, chiseled figures cut through a massive felled tree in a dynamic image of brute physicality that is enlivened by its luminous sculptural form and vigorous brushwork.

Although he refused to spell out his own politics, Millet is thought to have been a republican, and was definitely a Catholic. His monumental, unusually nostalgic “The Angelus” (1857-59, Musée d’Orsay, Paris—the show’s only foreign loan) drew on portrait studies of Barbizon peasants but was inspired by memories of his grandmother in Normandy, who insisted the family pause while working to pray upon hearing the church bells toll at morning, noon and evening. Described by the artist as a painting of sound, it draws together—in its depiction of bowed-headed workers firmly planted in the soil and praying at sunset in a hushed field with a church on the horizon—the resonant strands of rural labor, rustic piety and poetic landscape that have made it one of his best-known and most influential works.

It is also, however, a painting of time, an embodiment not only of the end of the rural working day but of the slower, pre-industrial eras that such later Millet adherents as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Gauguin would find enthralling. In their own quasi-religious works, they would seek to recapture the intense faith of the rural peasant class in deliberately simplified images that reflected a gentler, more peaceful age that had vanished.