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 place from his father, who was also a painter, and from obscure masters; he was still very young when he went to Paris.
Here, however, he struggled to make himself noticed, despite having exhibited landscapes at the Salon since 1840, in which, following the old fashion, he placed idyllic or mythological scenes. Then, perhaps under the influence of Daumier’s exacerbated, violent, dramatic, and programmatic painting,
he almost suddenly had the revelation of what his own manner of painting should be, and in 1848 he exhibited at the Salon two paintings of great importance that immediately drew the attention of critics: *The Winnower* and *The Man with a Hoe*. Two paintings in which the hard toil of field workers was exalted without rhetoric, but with spontaneous emotion. A programmatic and social painting, yet also imbued with intimate, authentic poetry and a profound sense of religiosity, which enabled him to transcend the limits of preconceived ideas, truly alien to art. *The Gleaners*, *The Return of the Flock*, and *The Angelus*, now in the Louvre in Paris, are widely known works that place Millet among the greatest French painters of the 19th century. Indeed, his figure stands alongside Courbet’s in the group of “realists,” also for the austere, broad, and simple sense with which he composed his paintings and the remarkably refined harmony of his color schemes.