Works by Jean-François Millet

Jean-François Millet did farm work as a boy on the Normandy coast, sowing and threshing among other jobs, and from 1849 he painted the peasants around Barbizon, stooping to glean or leaning on a hoe.

As the eldest son, Millet had to help his father on the farm at Gruchy, and mowing, threshing and sowing all came back later in his art. He trained in Cherbourg and then in Paris under Paul Delaroche, and in the early 1840s lived by painting portraits. Louise-Antoinette Feuardent, from 1841, wears a black dress with a white lace collar against a plain brown ground, and her wedding ring shows on the hand laid across her waist.

In June 1849 he moved his family to Barbizon. He kept coming back to gleaning, the right of the poor to pick up grain left after the harvest, for seven years before The Gleaners of 1857, where three women in dark homespun bend over the stubble while a cart is loaded beside huge stacks far behind them. At the Salon of 1863 the Paris bourgeoisie found Man with a Hoe brutish and frightening, and the picture was read as socialist protest, though Millet denied being a socialist or an agitator. The man leans on the handle, mouth open, in stony ground full of thistles.

Late in life he turned more and more to landscape. The Franco-Prussian War sent the family back to Cherbourg and Gréville until late in 1871, and The Cliffs of Gréville looks down a brown headland to a green sea fringed with surf under a lilac sky.

Sources: Wikipedia, J. Paul Getty Museum, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Musée d'Orsay.