Millet

Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) specialized in rural genre scenes of peasant life and labor that mix Realism with a melancholy nostalgia that endows his painted figures with an almost epic grandeur. In the wake of the massive migrations to Paris and the Revolution of 1848, which brought repressed plebian unrest to the fore, Millet's concentration on the rural peasant in the fields took on even greater socio-political force. His massive figures in noble attitudes were perceived as threatening by conservative critics, while the liberal press saw his elevation of the workers in terms of a socialist ideal that Millet himself did not actually embrace. Nonetheless, his highly influential Realist vision found poetry in the archaic farming methods of these resolutely "unmodern" contemporary figures who were as much a part of the French landscape as the Parisian dandys of the same era. Millet was famous for the honesty of his paintings, and it is important to note the almost sculptural quality of his figures. Thus, although the subject matter is resolutely Realist, the compositions have a Classical balance and harmony that rendered Millet's work less aggressively modern than Courbet's. Indeed, his images have a timeless quality that differs sharply from Courbet's historic specificity, while his figures are generalized rather than individual portraits. Millet's workers partake of both the grandeur of myth and the concreteness of reality, and in keeping with the politics of 1848 celebrate the moral and spiritual purity of the oppressed. His positive image of the rural land voices a critique of the increasingly industrialized urban landscape.
 
Millet is notable for his inclusion of female laborers and for a new approach to landscape that includes human forms engaged in exploiting, rather than admiring nature. In both The Garden Scene and Calling the Cows Home, the peasants are dwarfed by their labors (the cow and the garden), yet continue on. The Woman with a Rake is a prime example of Millet's monumental treatment of the rural worker, and the tension between the compositional force and drama of the image and its humble subject matter lend this painting much of its meaning. Finally, compare Shepherdess Seated on a Rock with one of Boucher's pastoral scenes (The Shepherd's Idyll). How can Realism be defined in opposition to the Rococo? How might you compare The Woman with a Rake to one of Ingres's portraits (i.e. La Princesse de Broglie or La Grande Odalisque) or to Delacroix's Abduction of Rebecca? Where can we locate the most important grounds of departure in both subject and style?
 
Millet's painting influenced many of the Impressionsists, including Van Gogh and Pissarro. Compare their visions of landscape, light, color and subject matter.