FREE ESSAY ON MILLET

MILLET

Millet, Jean-Fran?ois 
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(1814-75) The son of a small peasant farmer of Greville in Normandy, Millet showed a
precocious interest in drawing, and arrived in Paris in 1838 to become a pupil of Paul
Delaroche. He had to fight against great odds, living for long a life of extreme penury.
He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1840, and married two years later. At
this time, the main influences on him were Poussin and Eustache Le Sueur, and the type of
work he produced consisted predominantly of mythological subjects or portraiture, at
which he was especially adept (Portrait of a Naval Officer, 1845; Musee des Beaux-Arts,
Rouen). 
His memories of rural life, and his intermittent contacts with Normandy, however,
impelled him to that concern with peasant life that was to be characteristic of the rest
of his artistic career. In 1848 he exhibited The Winnower (now lost) at the Salon, and
this was praised by Theophile Gautier and bought by Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, the Minister
of the Interior. In 1849, when a cholera epidemic broke out in Paris, Millet moved to
Barbizon on the advice of the engraver Charles-Emile Jacque (1813-94) and took a house
near that of Theodore Rousseau. Devoted to this area as a subject for his work, he was
one of those who most clearly helped to create the Barbizon School. His paintings on
rural themes attracted growing acclaim and between 1858 and 1859 he painted the famous
Angelus (Musee d'Orsay), which 40 years later was to be sold for the sensational price of
553,000 francs. 
Although he was officially distrusted because of his real or imaginary Socialist
leanings, his own attitude towards his chosen theme of peasant life was curiously
ambivalent. Being of peasant stock, he tended to look upon farmworkers as narrow-minded
and oblivious of beauty, and did not accept the notion that `honest toil' was the secret
of happiness. In fact, his success partly stemmed from the fact that, though compared
with most of his predecessors and, indeed, his contemporaries, he was a `Realist', he
presented this reality in an acceptable form, with a religious or idyllic gloss.
Nevertheless, he became a symbol to younger artists, to whom he gave help and
encouragement. It was he who, on a visit to Le Havre to paint portraits, encouraged
Boudin to become an artist, and his work certainly influenced the young Monet, and even
more decidedly so Pissarro, who shared similar political inclinations. 
Although towards the end of his life, when he started using a lighter palette and freer
brushstrokes, his work showed some affinities with Impressionism, his technique was never
really close to theirs. He never painted out-of-doors, and he had only a limited
awareness of tonal values, but his draughtsmanship had a monumentality that appealed to
artists such as Seurat and van Gogh, who was also enthralled by his subject-matter, with
its social implications. Millet's career was greatly helped by Durand-Ruel. 
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