MILLET, JEAN-FRANÇOIS. - Painter, born at Gruchy near Gréville on 4 Oct. 1814, died at Barbizon on 20 Jan. 1875. He learned drawing and painting in his native land from his father, himself a painter, and from obscure masters; he was still very young when he went to Paris.
There, however, he found it difficult to attract notice, although from as early as 1840 he exhibited at the Salon, painting landscapes in which, according to the old fashion, he placed idyllic or mythological scenes. Then, perhaps under the influence of the exasperated, violent, dramatic, and programmatic painting of Daumier, he had an almost sudden revelation of what his manner of painting was to be, and in 1848 he exhibited at the Salon two pictures of great importance which immediately drew critical attention to him: the Winnower and the Man with the Hoe. These were two pictures in which the harsh toil of agricultural workers was exalted without rhetoric, but with spontaneous emotion. It was programmatic and social painting, yet also nourished by intimate and genuine poetry and by a profound sense of religiosity, which enabled him to transcend the limits of preconceived ideas, indeed alien to art. The Gleaners, the Return to the Farm, the Angelus, in the Louvre in Paris, are widely known paintings and place M. among the greatest French painters of the 19th century. Indeed, together with that of Courbet, his figure stands out among the group of the « realists », also by reason of the austere, broad, and simple sense with which he composed his pictures and the very remarkable refinement of his chromatic harmonies.