19th century French artist

Jean-Francois Millet (French: ; October 4, 1814 – January 20, 1875) was French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is famous for his scenes of peasants; it can be classified as part of the Realism art movement.

Life and work

the youth

Sheepfold. In this painting by Mill, the waning moon casts a mysterious light across the plain between the villages of Barbizon and Cham. Art Museum Walters.

Millet was the first child of Jean-Louis-Nicolas and Aimé-Henriette Adelaide Henry Mille, members of the rural community in the village of Gruchy, in Greville-The Hague (Normandy), near the coast. Under the guidance of two village priests—one of them was the vicar Jean Lebrisseux-Millet—he acquired a knowledge of Latin and modern authors. But soon he had to help his father with his farm job; because Millet was the eldest of the sons. Thus, all the farmer’s work was familiar to him: mowing, haying, tying sheaves, threshing, winnowing, spreading manure, plowing, sowing, etc. All these motives will return to him late art. This stopped when he was 18 and sent by his father to Cherbourg in 1833 to study with a portrait painter named Paul Dumouchel. By 1835 he was studying full-time with Lucien-Théophile Langlois, a pupil of Baron Gros, in Cherbourg. A scholarship provided by Langlois and others allowed Millet to move to Paris in 1837, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts with Paul Delaroche. In 1839 his scholarship was terminated and his first salon submission was rejected.

Paris

After his first painting, a portrait, was accepted at the Salon of 1840, Millet returned to Cherbourg to begin a career as a portrait painter. However, the following year he married Pauline-Virginie Ono and they moved to Paris. After the culling at the Salon of 1843 and the death of Pauline by Consumption, Millet returned to Cherbourg again. In 1845, Millet moved to Le Havre with Catherine Lemaire, whom he would marry in a civil ceremony in 1853; they would have nine children and remain together for the rest of Millet's life. In Le Havre he painted portraits and small genre pieces for several months before moving back to Paris.

It was in Paris in the mid-1840s that Millet befriended Troyon, Narcisse Diaz, Charles Jacquet and Théodore Rousseau, artists who, like Mill, would become associated with the Barbizon school; Honoré Daumier, whose draftsmanship would influence Millet's subsequent rendering of peasant subjects; and Alfred Sensier, a government bureaucrat who would become a lifelong supporter and eventually the artist's biographer. In 1847, his first success came with a salon with an exhibition of paintings Oedipus was demolished from the tree, and in 1848 his winnower was purchased by the government.

Captivity of the Jews in Babylon, Mill's most ambitious work at the time, was opened at the Salon of 1848, but was despised by art critics and the public. The painting eventually disappeared soon after, leading historians believe that the Millets destroyed it. In 1984, scientists from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston x-rayed Millet's 1870 painting young shepherdess looking for minor changes and found that it had been painted over captivity. It is now believed that millet was re-canvased when materials were in short supply during the Franco-Prussian War.

Barbizon

In 1849, millet painted combines, commission for the state. At this year's salon, he showed Shepherd sitting on the edge of the forest, very small oil painting, which marked a departure from previous idealized pastoral subjects, in favor of a more realistic and individual approach. In June of the same year he settled in Barbizon with Catherine and the children.

In 1850, Millet entered into an agreement with Sensier, who provided the artist with materials and money in exchange for drawings and paintings, while Millet was simultaneously free to continue selling the work to other buyers as well. At this year's salon, he showed mower And sower, his first major masterpiece and the earliest of an iconic trio of paintings that would include harvester And Angelus .

From 1850 to 1853, Millet worked at Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz), paintings, he will consider it the most important, and on which he worked longer. Conceived to rival its heroes Michelangelo and Poussin, it is also a painting that marked its transition from depiction symbolic images peasant life is that in modern social conditions. This was the only painting he had ever dated, and was the first work to earn him official recognition, a second class medal at the 1853 salon.

In Gleaners

This is one of Millet's most well known paintings, harvesters(1857). While the Millet was walking the field around Barbizon, one subject returned to her pencil and brush for seven years - picking up -The centuries-old right of poor women and children to remove bits of grain left in the fields after the harvest. He found a themed eternal one related to stories from Old Testament. In 1857 he introduced painting harvesters into the salon to Enthusiasm, even a hostile public.

(Earlier versions include a vertical composition, painted in 1854, in an etching of 1855-56, which directly foreshadows the horizontal format painting currently in the Musée d'Orsay.)

The warm golden light suggests something sacred and eternal in this everyday scene of a struggle for survival. Through years of preparatory research, Millet is considered to better convey the meaning of repetition and fatigue in Everyday life peasants Lines traced down each woman's back lead to the ground and then back again in a repetitive motion, identical to their never-ending, back-breaking labor. Along the horizon, the setting sun silhouettes a farm with its abundant stacks of grain, in contrast to the large shadowy figures in the foreground. The dark homespun dresses in Gleaners are cut into firm shapes against a golden field, giving each woman a noble, monumental strength.

Angelus

The painting was commissioned by Thomas Gold Appleton, an American art collector based in Boston, Massachusetts. Appleton had previously studied with another Mill, the Barbizon painter Troyon. It was completed during the summer of 1857. Millet added the bell tower and changed the original title of the work, Prayer for the potato harvest V Angelus when the buyer failed to take possession in 1859. Displayed to the public for the first time in 1865, the painting was changed several times, increasing only slightly in price, as some considered the artist's political sympathies to be suspect. After Mill's death ten years later, an auction war between the US and France ensued, ending a few years later with a price of 800,000 gold francs.

The discrepancy between the painting's apparent significance and the poor class of the surviving Millet family was a major impetus in the invention of the prerogative de luxe, intended to compensate artists or their heirs when works were resold.

Later years

Despite mixed reviews of the paintings he exhibited at the salon, Millet's reputation and success grew through the 1860s. Early in the decade, he contracted to paint 25 works in exchange for a monthly stipend for the next three years, and in 1865, another patron, Emile Gavet began introducing pastels for a collection that would eventually include 90 works. In 1867, the World's Fair hosted a major display of his work, with Gleaners , Angelus And potato planting among the paintings were exhibited. The following year, Frederick Hartmann commissioned Four Seasons for 25,000 francs, and Millet was named Chevalier de la Legion of Honor.

In 1870, Millet was elected to the jury of the Salon. Later that year, he and his family left the Franco-Prussian War, moving to Cherbourg and Greville and did not return to Barbizon until late 1871. last years were noted financial success and increased official recognition, but he was unable to carry out government commissions due to deteriorating health. On January 3, 1875, he married Catherine in a religious ceremony. Millet died on January 20, 1875.

heritage

Millet was an important source of inspiration for Vincent van Gogh, especially in early period. Millet and his work are mentioned many times in Vincent's letters to his brother Theo. Millet's late landscapes would serve as influential points of reference to Claude Monet's paintings on the coast of Normandy; its structural and symbolic content is influenced by Georges Seurat as well.

Millet main character Mark Twain's plays He is dead?(1898), in which he is depicted as struggling young artist who fakes his death to win fame and fortune. Most of the details about Mill in the game are fictitious.

Painting by Millet L"Homme la houe inspired the famous poem "The Man with the Hoe" (1898) by Edwin Markham. His poems also inspired the collection of American poet David Middleton The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems after a Photograph by Jean-François Millet (2005).

Angelus often reproduced in the 19th and 20th centuries. Salvador Dali was fascinated by this work, and wrote an analysis of it, The tragic myth of Angelus millet. Instead of viewing it as a work spiritual world, Dalí believed that they carried out reports of repressed sexual aggression. Dalí also believes that the two figures prayed for their child to be buried, and not for the Angelus. Dalí was so persistent in this that the eventual X-ray was made of canvas, confirming his suspicions: the painting contains a geometric shape painted on top that is strikingly similar to a coffin. However, it remains unclear whether Millet has changed his mind about the painting's meaning, or even if the shape is actually a coffin.

Gallery

• paintings by Jean-Francois Millet

Going to work , 1851-53

Shepherd Bow His Flock, early 1860s

Potato planters , 1861

Goose Girl , 1863

• Ciampa, Kermit S. Elevation landscape painting in France: Corot do Monet. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991. ISBN
• Honor, H. and Fleming, J. The World History arts. Seventh EDN. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2009. ISBN
• Murphy, Alexander R. Mill. Museum fine arts, Boston, 1984. ISBN
• Stokes, Simon. Art and copyright. Hart Publishing, 2001. ISBN
• Plaideux, Hugo. "L"après Inventaire décès et la DECLARATION de succession de Millet", in Revue de la Manche, vol. 53, FASC. 212, 2e trim. 2011, pp. 2-38.
• Plaideux, Hugo. "Une ENSEIGNE de vétérinaire cherbourgeois peinte par Millet en 1841", in Bulletin de la Francaise d'Société Histoire de la Médecine et des sciences vétérinaires, n ° 11, 2011, pp. 61-75.
• Lucien Lepoittevin. Catalog raisonné by Jean-François Millet en 2 volumes - Paris 1971/1973
• Lucien Lepoitevin. "Le Viquet - Retour sur les Premieres pas: un Millet millet" - N ° 139 Pâques 2003 - ISSN 0764-7948
• E Moreau-Nélaton - Monographie des references, Mille Raconte par lui-même- 3 volumes - Paris 1921
• Lucien Lepoittevin. Jean François Millet (Au delà de l'Angelus)- Ed de Monza - 2002 - (ISBN)
• L. Lepoittevin. Mill: Images and other Symboles, Editions Isoète Cherbourg 1990 (

Millet, along with Courbet, was one of the founders of realism in mid-19th century France.

Jean Francois Millet was born on October 4, 1814 in the village of Gruchy, in Normandy. He grew up in a patriarchal peasant family and from childhood he himself learned about peasant labor. Since 1833, Millet studied with the artist Mouchel in Cherbourg. The young artist's studies were interrupted by the death of his father in 1835. Millet had to return to the village, become the head of the family and start farming again. However, my family insisted on continuing my studies. Millet's second teacher was Langlois, a student of Gros, also a Cherbourg artist. Langlois obtained a subsidy from the city for Millet, and at the beginning of 1837 Francois went to Paris.

Millet enters Delaroche's workshop, participates in the competition for the Rome Prize, but does not receive it. Then he studies at the Suisse Academy. After some time he returns to his homeland, and then comes to Paris again.

Millet did not immediately find his path in art. At first, he painted paintings in the spirit of Boucher for sale and even appeared with them at the Salon of 1844. However, at the same time we see his serious, expressive portraits. Millet's work was finally taking shape by 1848 under the influence of liberation ideas that embraced a wide circle of artists and critics. In 1848, Millet exhibited The Winnower, and in 1849 he settled in the forest of Fontainebleau, in the village of Barbizon, where he lived all the time until his death (1875), occasionally traveling to his homeland. Peasant themes are firmly included in Millet’s work, starting with the Salons of 1850-1851, where his “The Sower” and “The Sheaf Knitters” appeared (Paris, Louvre). Millet knew well peasant life. He did not idealize the peasants, but managed to express greatness in their simple, thoughtful poses, and solemnity in their calm, stingy gestures; he managed to elevate the most prosaic work. In the late 40s - early 50s, he created generalized images of lonely peasant women, full of sadness and thoughtfulness: “The Seamstress” (1853, Paris, Louvre), “Seated Peasant Woman” (1849, Boston, Museum), “Woman with a Cow” "(Bourg-en-Bresse, Museum).

The tendency towards monumental forms is especially noticeable in such a painting with life-size figures as Sheep Shearing (1860).

Millet's contemporaries felt his passion for a sublime, heroic style. No wonder Théophile Gautier in 1855 spoke about Millet’s closeness to antiquity, about how, under the dark paint, a melancholic memory of Virgil trembles.

Millet also wrote landscapes, but they are almost always connected with the life of peasants; nature in Millet’s works is most often as joyless as the work of a peasant who earns his bread “by the sweat of his brow.”

Optimistic notes sound more often in his later works, where more attention is given to lighting. His mouth is evidenced by such works as “The Young Shepherdess” (1872, Boston, Museum) or “Harvesting Buckwheat” (1869-1874, ibid.).

Millet was not a writer, he had difficulty expressing his thoughts, and he was not a theorist. His letters and notes to some extent only sum him up creative experience, but they help us understand his own attitude towards real world, to man, to nature, to understand what tasks he set for himself in art. His statements, like all his creativity, are aimed at fighting against academic conventions. He opposes imitation and calls for focusing on one’s observations, one’s impressions of nature. But Millet is far from slavishly following nature; he demands from the artist individual perception and individual embodiment, defends his right to generalize and comprehend the real world. The artist must show his attitude towards the depicted. However, he contradicts himself in one thing: objectively, his works always had a certain social meaning, it was not for nothing that he placed himself next to Courbet. But at the same time, he protested when he was considered a socialist or called an artist more dangerous than Courbet, and he refused to take part in the federation of artists during the Paris Commune.

Coming from the people, Jean-François Millet is rightfully considered the largest representative of the truly folk genre in the art of France of the 19th century.

The artist was born on the English Channel coast near Greville, in the Norman village of Gruchy, into a wealthy peasant family. Involved in rural labor since childhood, Jean-François was able to study painting only from the age of eighteen in the nearby city of Cherbourg from Mouchel, a student of David, and then from Langlois de Chevreuil, a student of Gros.

In 1837, thanks to a modest scholarship awarded by the municipality of Cherbourg, Millet began studying at the Paris School of Fine Arts with the then popular historical painter Delaroche. But academic Delaroche and Paris with its noise and bustle equally constrain Millet, who is accustomed to the rural space. The Louvre alone seemed to him, by his own admission, a “saving island” in the middle of a city that seemed “black, dirty, smoky” to a recent peasant. “Saved” were the beloved works of Mantegna, Michelangelo and Poussin, in front of whom he felt “like in his own family,” while from contemporary artists attracted one Delacroix.

In the early 40s, Millet was helped to find his own identity by a few close people, executed in a modest, restrained palette, which laid the foundation for his in-depth understanding of peasant looks and characters.

In the second half of the 40s, Millet was inspired by communication with Daumier and the Barbizons, especially with Theodore Rousseau. But the main milestone for the artist’s work was the revolution of 1848 - the same year when his painting “The Winnower” was exhibited at the Salon, perceived as a creative declaration.

In the summer of 1849, Millet left Paris forever for Barbizon and here, surrounded by a large family, began to cultivate the land in the literal and figurative sense: in the morning he worked in the fields, and in the afternoon he painted pictures of the life of farmers in the workshop, where scattered peasant things coexisted with casts of masterpieces Parthenon. “The hero from the ploughman” (Rolland), he was a recognized scholar in everything related to epic bucolic poetry starting with Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, a lover of Hugo and Shakespeare, as well as the philosophy of Montaigne and Pascal. But Millet looks for his “Homeric” heroes in everyday life, discerning “true humanity” in the most unnoticed of workers. “At the risk of being branded a socialist,” he takes on the highly social theme of labor, which is unpopular and little explored by painters. Indifferent to details, the painter usually completes his subjects from memory, making a strict selection and bringing together all the heterogeneity of living observations. Through expressive, almost sculptural chiaroscuro, sculpting the figures of people in large undifferentiated masses, and the restrained power of muted color, he strives to achieve a generalizing typification of the characters in the confidence that it is the collective “type that is the deepest truth in art.”

Millet's typification is wide-ranging - from the typical sincerity of the professional gesture of plowmen, sawmills, and woodcutters to the expression of the highest poetry of labor. This is not just work, but lot, fate, moreover, in its dramatic aspect - as an eternal overcoming and struggle - with circumstances, with, with the earth. Millet discovers the special greatness of overcoming in the measured rhythms of the peasant and derives from here the very special spirituality of a man of manual labor.

The master expressed it most fully in the painting “The Sower,” which amazed visitors to the 1851 Salon. In the figure dominating the endless expanse of fields, the author brings the generalization of the eternal martial arts and the connection of man with the earth to high symbol. From now on, every painting by Millet is accepted as a public event.

Thus, “The Ear Gatherers” caused an even greater critical storm at the Salon of 1857. In their majestically slow pace, the bourgeois, not without reason, suspected a hidden threat to the usual “foundations,” although Millet’s work is also familiar with pure tenderness, especially in female images. In “The Auvergne Shepherdess”, “The Spinner”, “Churning Butter” he exalts the most humble household work, and in “Feeding the Chicks” and “First Steps” he glorifies the joys of motherhood, without ever stooping to sentimentality. In Grafting a Tree (1855), Millet combines the theme of a child with escape into a single hope for the future. Millet deliberately contrasted the naturalness of his peasants and the nature around them, the purity of their life, with the moral degradation of the upper classes of the Second Empire.

In a pair of tired peasants from “Angelus” (1859), Millet reveals to the townspeople the subtlety of the soul, the ineradicable need for beauty, hidden under the bark of habitual coarseness. But the formidable power of the gloomy “Man with a Hoe” is something completely different, which frightened the critics of the 1863 Salon for good reason. In a figure no less monolithic than the “Sower”, behind the boundless fatigue one can feel growing anger. “The Man with a Hoe” and “The Resting Winegrower” are the most tragic of Millet’s heroes - images of the crushed, concentrating in themselves the motives of spontaneous social protest on the verge of explosion.

Since the mid-60s, Millet often paints landscapes in which he strives to express the eternal unity of man with nature, invariably lovingly noting everywhere the touch, the trace of man - be it a harrow left on a furrow or freshly swept haystacks. Behind the external awkwardness of the silhouette of the squat “Church in Grushi”, as if rooted in the ground, a patient meekness akin to the heroes of “Angelus” shines through, and in landscapes like “Gust of Wind”, the same indomitability of the elements that secretly accumulated in his rebels - winegrowers, seems to break through and diggers.

In the 70s, Millet stopped exhibiting at the Salon, however, his fame grew. The master’s hermitage is increasingly disturbed by visitors - collectors and simply fans; even students from different countries Europe. It was not in vain that, when he passed away in 1875, the artist prophetically announced: “My work is not yet done. It’s barely starting.”

He brought out peasant theme from the narrowness of local ethnography, he got rid of falsehood and gloss, replacing the sensitive with heroic, and narration with the strict poetry of his generalizations. His diligent successors of realism and authenticity of heroes were such artists as Bastien-Lepage and Lhermitte, and the poetry of labor was developed in his own way by the Belgian Constantin Meunier.

Millet's landscapes had a direct influence on Pissarro's uninhibited simplicity and lyricism, but he received his most innovative response in Holland from Vincent van Gogh, who brought the rebellious spirit to its utmost sharpness in the inexhaustible theme of the combat of man with the earth.

Jean Francois Millet(Millet, 1814-1874) - French painter of rural life. The son of a peasant, he spent his youth among rural nature, helping his father with his farm and field work. Only at the age of 20 did he begin to study drawing in Cherbourg with little-known artists Mouchel and Langlois. On the advice of the latter and with the funds he had collected, he arrived in Paris in 1835, where he became an apprentice to P. Delaroche, but two years later he left his mentor and, having got married, began to earn money by depicting naked women in the spirit of Diaz, shepherdesses, shepherds or bathers in the taste of Boucher and Fragonard. The first paintings he exhibited in the Paris salon, “The Driving Lesson” (1844), “The Milkmaid” (1844), “Oedipus Tied to a Tree” (1845) and “The Jews in Babylonian Captivity” (1845), were no better than ordinary products the then dominant direction French painting. But since 1848, he broke off all connection with this direction and, having moved from Paris to Barbizon, near Fontainebleau, almost never leaving there and even rarely coming to the capital, he devoted himself exclusively to reproducing rural scenes that were intimately familiar to him in his youth - peasants and peasant women. at various points in their working lives. His paintings of this kind, uncomplicated in composition, executed rather sketchily, without highlighting the details of the drawing and without writing out details, but attractive in their simplicity and unvarnished truth, imbued with sincere love for the working people, did not find due recognition among the public for a long time. He began to become famous only after the Paris World Exhibition of 1867, which brought him great gold medal. From that time on, his reputation as a first-class artist who introduced a new, living current into French art quickly grew, so that at the end of Millet’s life, his paintings and drawings, for which he had once received very modest money, were already sold for tens of thousands of francs. After his death, speculation, taking advantage of the even more intensified fashion for his works, brought their price to fabulous proportions. So, in 1889, at the auction of the Secret's collection, his small painting: "Evening Good News" (Angelus) was sold to an American art partnership for an amount of over half a million francs. In addition to this picture, among Millet’s best works on subjects from peasant life are “The Sower”, “Watching Over the Sleeping Child”, “Sick Child”, “Newborn Lamb”, “Grafting of a Tree”, “End of the Day”, “Threshing”, "Return to the Farm", "Spring" (in the Louvre Museum, Paris) and "The Ear Gatherers" (ibid.). In the Museum of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, among the paintings of the Kushelev Gallery, there is an example of Millet's painting - the painting "Return from the Forest".

How many factors had to come together for Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) became a recognized genius of realism? Life tossed this artist from side to side, but by chance or his own perseverance he always managed to stay on his feet.

Millet was born in the small French village of Gruchy. His peers spent their childhood in the fields, where they worked along with adults. But this fate of Jean-François passed, because his father served as an organist in a local church, and his uncle was a doctor. The boy received a good education, he read a lot and even learned Latin. In addition, the ability to draw awakened in him early, which became a discovery for the family. And the failed “farmer” was sent to study in the city.

The artist changed many schools and mentors, among which were the workshops of du Mouchel, Delaroche, and the Parisian School of Fine Arts. But it so happened that after a long period of study he found himself on the verge of poverty. For this reason, his first wife, who was suffering from tuberculosis, died. Her death was a heavy blow for the artist.

To earn a living, Millet began painting portraits. Once he even took on an unusual job: to posthumously immortalize the image of the mayor of Cherbourg. But the resemblance could not be achieved, and the customer did not take the painting. Soon the artist abandoned creating portraits and switched to mythological subjects, which brought him fame. But this direction also did not attract the artist for long. And there were two reasons for this. Firstly, in 1848, a revolution occurred in France, the king was overthrown and the Second Republic was proclaimed. Accordingly, the public's interests and preferences have changed dramatically.

Secondly, Millet moved to the village of Barbizon, where a society of artists was formed, among whom were many of his friends. They entered the history of world painting as the “Barbizon school” of French landscape painters.

Millet was fascinated by the village and decided to dedicate his work to it. Of course, his childhood and the growing public interest in rural themes played a significant role here. The artist planned not only to paint ordinary provincial landscapes, he wanted to find the soul and subtle psychologism in them. And his most famous works fully possess these qualities.

Among them, the most typical painting is “The Sower” (De zaaier, 1850). Almost the entire space is occupied by the figure of a peasant sowing grain. His image is collective; the artist deliberately emphasizes typical details, characteristic gestures and elaboration of the landscape. The simple working man becomes a symbol of hard work.

Work for Millet was like the essence of being, great power, capable of breaking and enslaving. The film was a success, but was purchased not by French, but by American viewers. The canvas has a huge number of replicas, parodies and allusions. The most famous copy belongs to the hand of himself. The image of a peasant who embodied great power work, so inspired the master in his youth that he repeated it more than once in his life.

Another painting, “The Ear Pickers” (Des glaneuses, 1857), caused mixed reviews from critics who were accustomed to looking for political implications in art. Some of them even saw this work as a provocation. Although in it Millet depicted only an ordinary village scene: bending low to the ground, peasant women in the field collect the remaining ears of corn after the harvest.

It is unknown whether the artist put any social meaning into this plot, but it is impossible not to notice that it is literally filled with light and rural air.

Painting "Angelus" ( Evening prayer) (L "Angélus, 1859) turned out to be more poetic, although its action also takes place in a field. It is difficult to remain indifferent when looking at a married couple frozen in deep prayer, and the honey colors of the sunset give the surrounding environment a special beauty, peace and evoke feelings of light sadness.

This painting inspired many artists, including Salvador Dali himself.

In the second half of his life, Millet became so famous artist, which became the prototype of one of the literary heroes Mark Twain. In the story “He Lives or Died,” poor painters try to fake the death of their comrade in order to sell his paintings at a higher price. Jean-François Millet became this comrade.

The American writer did not explain why his choice fell on Millet. But there were plenty of incomprehensible and inexplicable things in the artist’s life. And really, isn’t it surprising that a village boy became a classic of French painting? But the fact remains that he became one, and viewers still enjoy the wonderful works of one of the most famous and talented “Barbizonians”.