MILLET, JEAN-FRANÇOIS. - Painter b. at Gruchy near Gréville on 4 Oct. 1814, d. at Barbizon on 20 Jan. 1875. He learned drawing and painting in his homeland from his father, himself a painter, and from obscure masters; he was still very young when he left for Paris.
Here, however, he struggled to make himself noticed, despite having exhibited at the Salon since as early as 1840, painting landscapes in which, according to the old fashion, he placed idyllic or mythological scenes. Then, perhaps through the influence of Daumier's exasperated, violent, dramatic and programmatic painting, he had an almost sudden revelation of what his manner of painting was to be, and in 1848 he exhibited at the Salon two paintings of great importance that immediately drew the interest of the critics upon him: The Winnower and The Man with the Hoe. Two paintings in which the hard toil of the workers of the fields was exalted without oratory, but with spontaneous emotion. Programmatic and social painting, but also nourished by intimate, authentic poetry and by a profound sense of religiosity, which allows him to go beyond the limits of preconceived ideas, foreign, in truth, to art. The Gleaners, The Return to the Farm, and the Angelus, in the Louvre in Paris, are widely known paintings and place M. among the greatest French painters of the 19th century. And truly his figure emerges together with that of Courbet from the group of the "realists," also for the austere, broad and simple sense with which he composed his paintings and the very remarkable fineness of his chromatic harmonies.
Bibliography2 works
Emilio Lavagnino