Jean Francois Millet (Kunst)

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Jean Francois Millet (1814-1875) is the artist who occupies the very core of the Barbizon movement. As he no doubt would have wished, his pictures have always taken precedence over his life, and the facts of his unremarkable biography are not well-known. Born into a moderately successful land-owning family in Gruchy in 1814, he went as a youth to study in Cherbourg with a local portrait painter and later with Lang1ois, a student of Gros. His last formal instruction was in Paris where he worked in the studio of the history painter Paul Delaroche from 1837-1840: in 1841 he returned to Cherbourg to set himself up as a portrait painter and he married for the first time. Success eluded Millet in these early years, as it did through much of his career, and his young wife Pauline’s death of consumption in 1844 was probably the deciding factor in his move to Le Havre in 1845 and later the same year back to Paris in the company of Catherine Lemaire. Catherine was a domestic servant who could neither read nor write, but she remained Millet’s companion, bearing him nine children between 1846 and 1863: they were married in a civil ceremony in 1853, and in a religious one in 1875, seventeen days before the artist’s death.

In Paris, Millet established friendships with men who were to become his partners in the movement to change the way the world looked at landscape: future colleagues such as Troyon, Diaz, Jacque, Daumier and Rousseau. With their help he began to sell a few paintings, and found his first officially recognized success.

Following the Revolution of 1848, Millet became increasingly interested in peasant scenes and types that demonstrated a stoic, almost biblical realism. Although Millet was not a committed revolutionary, his images from this time on reflected a true concern for contemporary problems and became increasingly somber. The proceeds from a state commission freed Millet to leave Paris in 1849 for Barbizon where he joined his new friends and devoted himself to peasant life and rural scenes, During the next few years he painted some of his best known images, including Harvesters (1849), The Sower (1850) (exhibited in the same Salon with Courbet’s Stonebreakers and Burial at Ornans) and Harvesters Resting (1853), but financial success did not follow.



He had, by this time, numerous American admirers and one of them, the Boston painter William Morris Hunt, visited Barbizon in 1851, Writing of Millet: “I found him working in a cellar, three feet underground, his pictures mildewing with the dampness, as there was no floor. I bought as much of his work as I could.” This included The Sawer for $60. His lifelong friend and supporter Alfred Sensier gave Millet canvas and paint in exchange for works of art, and Rousseau purchased several works. Through the 1850s Millet’s reputation slowly grew and as his market developed he was finally able to feel confident in the path he had chosen.

The Gleaners and The Angelus (both 1857) and Man with a Hoe (1863) demonstrated Millet’s continuing awareness of the plight of the peasant, but from the mid-60s onward he focused increasingly upon landscape, and he devoted much of himself to the remarkable pastels commissioned by the wealthy Parisian architect, Emile Gavet. He became firmly.

Millet’s greatness lies in his singular ability to exploit his traditional French artistic background and values in the service of such untraditional subjects as peasant workers and their fields. He endowed these figures and landscapes with a solidity and monumentality that guaranteed them a pivotal place in the history of art.
•Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
•Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY
•Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
•Art Museum Bern, Switzerland
•Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Great Britain
•Ball State University Art Gallery, Muncie, IN
•Brigham Young University Fine Arts Collection, Provo, UT
•Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal
•Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA
•City and Land Art Galleries of Low Saxony, Hannover, Germany
•Denver Art Museum, CO
•Grobet-Labadie Museum, Marseille, France
•Hendrik Willem Mesdag National Museum, Hague, the Netherlands
•Hermitage Museum, Leningrad
•John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, PA
•Kroller-Muller National Museum, Otterloo, the Netherlands
•Malden Public Library, MA
•Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY
•Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN
•Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
•Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France
•Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma
•Museum of Fine Art, Bordeaux, France
•Museum of Fine Art, Budapest, Hungary
•Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
•National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
•National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, Great Britain
•National Gallery, London
•National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan
•Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO
•North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
•Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, FL
•Paine Art Center, Oshkosh, WI
•Petworth House, Great Britain
•Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C
•Phoenix Art Museum, AZ
•Princeton Art Museum, NJ
•Queensland National Art Gallery and Museum, Brisbane, Australia
•Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA
•Snite Museum of Art at University of Notre Dame, IN
•State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
•Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA
•Taft Museum, Cincinatti, OH
•The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
•The Louvre, Paris, France
•The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
•The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
•Toledo Museum of Art, OH
•William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center, Chapel Hill, NC
http://galeriemichael.com/artists/millet-jean-francois/