In its bicentennial year, London's National Gallery is marking the 150th anniversary of Jean-François Millet's death in 1875 with a one-room exhibition celebrating his portrayal of rural workers in northern France. A total of just 15 works – nine paintings and six drawings – offer a thoughtful introduction to Millet's study of rural working life.
Born into a farming family in Normandy in 1814, Millet trained in Cherbourg, then Paris. In 1849 he moved to Barbizon, a village on the edge of the forest at Fontainebleu; all but the first two paintings date from his time there.
The Sower shows a man scattering seed under a stormy sky, while birds gather to steal the grain. In The Winnower, a man holds a winnowing fan, a specially shaped basket, to separate the wheat from the chaff with repetitive motions; his trouser legs are stuffed with straw for warmth. In this, as in the other paintings and drawings of men at work, they are almost a photographic snapshot, the men's movement caught in a frozen moment epitomising hard labour; the body often at an awkward angle, knees bent to take the strain.
The detail is telling. In The Wood Choppers, a man holds down a pile of cut sticks with one foot while he ties it into a bundle. In The Wood Sawyers two men hold either end of a huge saw, cutting through a massive tree trunk; both are shown straining, while one steadies himself with a foot against the trunk. A sketch of Two Men Sawing and Splitting Wood again shows the sheer effort as one man raises a huge mallet above his head, to bring down on the wedge in the piece of wood at his feet.
Rarely for artists of the time, Millet also portrayed women at work. A Milkmaid shows a woman carrying a copper can of milk on her shoulder, stabilised by a leather strap around her wrist. Again the tiny details show the artist's deep observation: the top of the can is stuffed with grass to protect the milk.
In The Well at Gruchy, Millet has returned to the home where he grew up, following his grandmother's death. He made a number of studies of the house, and the well opposite, where a young woman rinses out two copper milk cans which Millet recalled his sister Emélie doing in his childhood.
Two small drawings are studies for his painting Shepherdess at Rest, showing a young girl, little more than a child, leaning against a tree, her stick in hand. The Goose Girl at Gruchy is one of the few paintings here with a splash of colour, the red and blue of different layers of the girl's clothing against the cold as she stands, wearily leaning on her staff, surrounded by her geese. A fine chalk drawing of A Shepherdess – a favourite subject for Millet in the 1850s – shows a woman leaning against a rock, using her time tending her flock on her own to knit.
The final two paintings are both titled The Faggot Gatherers, one from 1850-55, the other from 1868-75. In the first a young woman stands facing an exhausted older woman who sits by the pile of branches they have gathered to sell for fuel, for a pittance. In the later one, three women are bent almost double under the cumbersome weight of the huge bundles of sticks on their backs as they come out of the forest of Fontainebleu.
Considering the care with which Millet details the braced leg, the strained muscles, the bodies twisted in physical effort and the exhausted stance, it's strange that very often he doesn't show a clear face among these rural workers.
The exhibition's curator, Sarah Herring, notes this: although he made small sketches from real life, he often painted from memory in his studio, and so the faces "become simplified, even abstracted".
This lack of individuality, along with the size of the paintings, she says, "lent his figures a nobility normally only given to figures from history, the Bible or mythology".
That strikes me as over-intellectualising the point. Quite apart from the fact that in many classical and biblical paintings the faces are clearly individualised, I think it unlikely that Millet was aiming to portray the "nobility" of the working man at all but rather, if anything, the universality of the grindingly hard life labourers faced every day, and the constant fatigue of their lives.
Millet was lauded by those on the Left as a reformer (and criticised by those on the Right as a subversive) for this portrayal, but he was not the revolutionary both sides wanted to paint him as; rather, he painted harsh reality, treating these rural workers with dignity.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is The Angelus, two people, perhaps a husband and wife, pausing in their work in a field with bowed heads to say the Angelus, in response to the bells of a church just visible in the background. It's a painting loved by several other artists, including Dalí, who made many versions of it including Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, and Van Gogh, who made copies of a number of Millet's paintings.
It's a very spiritual painting, showing a moment of true piety. In 1865, a few years after he painted it, Millet wrote: "The Angelus is a picture that I painted while remembering how, when working at that time in the fields, my grandmother, on hearing the bell ringing, never failed to make us stop our work to say the Angelus prayer 'for those poor departed', very piously and with hat in hand."
The church bell would be rung for the Angelus at sunrise, noon and sunset.
The Angelus was apparently one of Millet's favourite works – so was it a painting with deep spiritual significance for him, or was it merely a nostalgic childhood memory of working in the fields with his pious grandmother? Opinion is divided, depending on who you read. A fascinating essay in the slim but very worthwhile catalogue mentions that Millet described his grandmother's "beautiful religion" that "gave her the strength to love so deeply and unselfishly".
But as an adult Millet did not regularly attend church. He married his wife in a civil ceremony, after they had already had four children together; they only married in a religious ceremony over 20 years later, when he was close to death. And some of his early artistic works were erotic in nature – a fact completely ignored by his friend and biographer Alfred Sensier.
Yet Millet had grown up studying the Bible in Latin, and reading Augustine's Confessions and the letters of St Jerome. Years later he met the priest who had taught him, who asked if he still read the Bible and the Psalms. Millet replied: "They are my breviary. It is there that I find all that I paint."
Perhaps that is where he found his obvious respect for shepherds and other rural workers.
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Photo: Jean-François Millet's 'The Angelus' (1857-9)
'Millet: Life on the Land' is at the National Gallery, London, until 19 October
This article appears in the September 2025 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre and counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door any where in the world click HERE.
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