Artist

Jean-François Millet — the painter of peasants

1814, Gruchy (Gréville-Hague) — 1875, Barbizon

Barbizon School · Realism

Timeline

1814

Born in Gruchy, Normandy

1837

Awarded a scholarship to study in Paris

1849

Settled permanently in Barbizon

1857

*The Gleaners* at the Salon

1875

Died in Barbizon

Barbizon, on the Chailly Plain, in the late 1850s. Two peasants stop in a field at twilight. In the distance, a church bell rings the Angelus. The man takes off his hat; the woman bows her head. Between them, in the grass, lie a pitchfork, a wheelbarrow, and a basket of potatoes.

The painter observing them is forty-five years old. His name is Jean-François Millet. He was born into a family of farmers in Normandy; he learned to read Latin from a great-uncle who was a priest; he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; and he has lived in this village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau since 1849. He paints peasants. Going against all the trends of his time, he became the first great painter of peasant life in France.

The painting he was working on that evening would become *The Angelus*. Today, it is one of the most widely reproduced images of the entire 19th century, and the work that allowed millions of viewers around the world to see a peasant for the first time.

Gruchy’s Child

Jean-François Millet was born on October 4, 1814, in Gruchy, a hamlet in the commune of Gréville-Hague, on the northwestern tip of the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. His parents—Jean-Louis-Nicolas Millet and Aimée-Henriette-Adélaïde Henry—were prosperous farmers who owned their own farm, whose fields bordered the cliffs overlooking the English Channel. He was the eldest of eight children.

The family was not poor. They were rural, devout, and well-educated. Millet’s paternal great-uncle, a priest, taught him to read, introduced him to Latin, and helped him discover Virgil and the Bible. Throughout his life, Millet would quote from memory the texts he had read in his childhood—a trait that biographers have often failed to note, butwhich Universalis highlights: Millet was one of the most erudite artists of his century, trained not in the Parisian studios but through a classical education received in the quiet of the Gréville presbytery.

At the age of eighteen, he began an apprenticeship in painting in Cherbourg, first with the portrait painter Bon Du Mouchel, then with Théophile Langlois de Chèvreville, a student of Antoine-Jean Gros. In 1837, the city of Cherbourg awarded him a municipal scholarship that enabled him to move to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts.

He is twenty-three years old, comes from a farm in the Cotentin region, and is heading for the capital. He will stay there, on and off, for twelve years before finally finding, in Barbizon, the place where he will paint.

Paris: A Journey Through the Desert

In Paris, Millet enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Paul Delaroche, a history painter then at the height of his fame. The experience was brief and tumultuous. Millet could not stand official painting, academic competitions, or the spirit of the Salon. He left the studio after a few months and made several unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome.

For him, the 1840s were a decade of financial hardship. He lived in modest rooms in the Rue Rochechouart neighborhood of Montmartre. To make ends meet, he painted what the market demanded: commissioned portraits (often excellent—his *Portrait of Pauline Ono*, 1841, now in the Thomas-Henry Museum in Cherbourg, is one of the finest paintings of this period), and above all mythological nudes in the 18th-century style, sold by the dealer Narcisse Diaz.

This body of work earned him a problematic reputation. The critic Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, in his 1921 monograph, recounted the phrase used at the time: Millet was reportedly described as a “specialist in throats and buttocks.” The painter of peasants that he would later become developed his style in explicit contrast to this early commercial approach.

His personal life was also in shambles. In 1841, he married Pauline Ono, whom he had met in Cherbourg. She died of tuberculosis in April 1844, at the age of twenty-one. A widower at the age of thirty, Millet returned to Normandy, then went back to Paris, where, in 1845, he met Catherine Lemaire, a seventeen-year-old maid with whom he would live until his death. They had nine children. They had a civil wedding in 1853 in Barbizon. Their religious wedding took place only on January 5, 1875 —fifteen days before Millet’s death.

Another pivotal encounter took place in the late 1840s: thatwith Alfred Sensier, an employee of the Ministry of the Interior and an art enthusiast, who became his friend, agent, dealer, confidant, and first biographer. The Millet-Sensier correspondence — 708 letters now preserved in the Louvre’s Department of Graphic Arts (Moreau-Nélaton Collection, bequest of 1927) — is one of the most valuable sources we have on the life of a 19th-century French painter.

Barbizon, 1849

In June 1849, a cholera epidemic ravaged Paris. Millet and his family fled. Together with his friend, the painter Charles Jacque, they decided to take refuge in a village south of the Forest of Fontainebleau that they had visited together shortly before: Barbizon, then a simple hamlet in the town of Chailly-en-Bière.

Millet never imagined he would stay there. He remained there for twenty-six years, until his death in 1875.

In Barbizon, he joined a circle of painters that had formed there in the early 1830s and would later, in art history, come to be known as the Barbizon School: Théodore Rousseau (who would become his closest friend), Charles-François Daubigny, Constant Troyon, Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, and Charles Jacque. They all shared the same conviction: landscape painting should be done from life, outdoors, in direct contact with nature, and no longer in Parisian studios based on idealized memories.

Millet brings something to this circle that none of his friends do: he places people at the heart of the landscape. While Rousseau paints oak trees and Daubigny paints the banks of the Seine, Millet paints those who plow, those who glean, and those who sow.

In a letter to Sensier dated 1850, shortly after he settled in Barbizon, Millet describes his friend Rousseau in the forest:

“The forest, the silence, the solitude—Rousseau loves them even more than I do.”

— Jean-François Millet, letter to Alfred Sensier, 1850

This friendship would serve as the emotional foundation of his entire time in Barbizon. When Théodore Rousseau died in December 1867, Millet was devastated. He was buried next to him in 1875 at the Chailly-en-Bière cemetery.

The Painter of Peasants

Three works established Millet’s reputation and profoundly redefined what rural painting could be in France. All three were painted in the 1850s in Barbizon, and all three are now globally recognizable images.

*The Sower* (1850 Paris Salon, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; second version at the Musée d’Orsay) depicts a peasant in motion, legs apart, his right arm thrust forward to scatter the seed. The figure stands out against a twilight sky. This is Millet’s manifesto painting: a peasant captured not in a pose, but in the act of movement. Critics of the time were divided. Some journalists accused Millet of “practicing socialism” —a term that was pejorative at the time, implying a political desire to subvert the social order. Théophile Gautier, who was more moderate, spoke of “masonry of colors,” criticizing Millet for his muted tones and rough modeling.

*The Gleaners* (1857, in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay) depicts three peasant women bent over in a harvested field, gathering ears of wheat that have fallen to the ground. At the time, gleaning was an ancestral right of the poorest: women were allowed to gather what the harvesters had left behind. The painting, presented at the 1857 Salon, caused a scandal in the conservative press. *Le Figaro* saw it as a “threat to property.” But the painting gradually gained acceptance. Today, it is one of the most frequently reproduced works at the Musée d’Orsay.

*The Angelus* (1857–1859, Musée d’Orsay) is probably Millet’s most famous painting and one of the most widely reproduced works of the 19th century by any artist. Two peasants, a man and a woman, pause in a field at twilight to recite the Angelus prayer as it is rung out from the bell tower in the distance. The painting, long rejected by art dealers, was finally sold in 1859 for 1,000 francs, then resold after Millet’s death for astronomical sums. Salvador Dalí dedicated an entire book to it in 1963 (*The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus*) after an X-ray of the painting revealed that Millet had initially painted a baby’s coffin between the two peasants, which he later painted over. This X-ray discovery is now confirmed by the Musée d’Orsay.

These three paintings— *The Sower*, *The Gleaners*, and *The Angelus* — changed the status of the peasant in French art. Before Millet, painters depicted peasants as decorative figures in conventional, idealized pastoral scenes. Millet elevated them to the status of historical art. He painted them full-length, life-size, in monumental compositions that the Academy had previously reserved for ancient heroes and saints. It was this, above all, that caused a scandal in 1850: not the subject matter itself, but the status he bestowed upon them.

A sad yet proud voice

The 708 letters from Millet to Sensier preserved at the Louvre give us access—as is the case with few other 19th-century painters—to the artist’s inner voice. A voice that is not what one might imagine.

Millet is not the rough, silent peasant of legend. He is a man of letters who quotes Virgil, reads Pascal, and knows Poussin by heart. But he is also a deeply melancholic man, whose correspondence with Sensier reveals constant suffering: financial difficulties, artistic doubts, and sadness over the plight of the peasantry, which he knows will not improve.

In a famous letter from 1850, quoted by Sensier in his posthumous biography *La Vie et l’œuvre de Jean-François Millet* (published in 1881), Millet writes:

“It’s never the happy side that stands out to me—I don’t know where it is; I’ve never seen it.”

— Jean-François Millet, letter to Alfred Sensier, 1850

This sentence is often cited to portray Millet as a depressed painter. But when read in the context of his entire correspondence, it conveys something else: Millet acknowledges that joy is not his subject. He does not paint to delight the bourgeoisie; he does not paint to decorate a parlor; he does not paint to flatter. He paints to bear witness. He does not see the joyful side of peasant life—not because he is blind, but because that is not where he looks.

It was this austere and proud demeanor that caused a scandal in conservative circles and, conversely, made Millet the painter celebrated by left-wing writers of the Second Empire. Émile Zola saw him as a painter of the people. Later, Leo Tolstoy would cite him in his writings on art as the ultimate model of artistic sincerity.

A work that set a precedent

Although he was recognized late in his lifetime— in 1874, a year before his death, the French government finally commissioned him to decorate the Panthéon with scenes from the life of Saint Geneviève (a commission he would not have time to complete)—, Millet’s work became a model in the twenty years following his death.

Camille Pissarro adapted his approach to depicting rural landscapes throughout his paintings from the 1870s to the 1880s. Georges Seurat, through the rhythmic and geometric structure of his compositions, carried forward Millet’s lesson on the monumental dignity bestowed upon ordinary people. Paul Cézanne, though more reserved, nevertheless admired Millet’s ability to “paint the peasant without turning him into a clown” (a phrase reported by art critics). And Leo Tolstoy, in his treatise *What Is Art? * (1898), cites him as one of the very few painters of his century to have respected what he considers to be art’s primary mission: the sincere conveyance of human emotion.

But it is probably in the case of Vincent van Gogh that the connection is most thoroughly documented. Van Gogh discovered Millet at the age of seventeen, through the reproductions then distributed by the Goupil Gallery, where he worked. When he decided in 1880, at the age of twenty-seven, to abandon theology to become a painter, his first exercises were copies of Millet’s drawings illustrating *Les Travaux des champs*. Van Gogh’s reading of Sensier’s biography of Millet in 1882 is documented in his correspondence as a pivotal experience.

According to Universalis, Van Gogh went so far as to see Millet as “a sort of little-known priest of a nature-based religion, whom he would strive to emulate.” At the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, during the winter of 1889–1890, while struggling with illness and doubt, Van Gogh painted approximately twenty-one copies of Millet’s works — *The Sower*, The Diggers, The Midday Rest, The Shearing of the Sheep, The Spinner, and many others. These copies were not academic exercises. They were intimate dialogues between a sick painter and the voice of a master who had died fifteen years earlier.

This may be the most beautiful tribute one painter has ever paid to another in the entire history of Western painting.

Where to see his works

Millet’s major collections are concentrated in four locations, three of which are in France.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris — Key works: *The Gleaners* (1857), *The Angelus* (1857–1859), *Spring* (1868–1873), and several studies and pastels. This is a must-see for anyone who wants to understand Millet.

Thomas-Henry Museum, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin —the finest regional collection, in the city where Millet served his apprenticeship. Its holdings include the *Portrait of Pauline Ono* (1841), several self-portraits, and early drawings.

Jean-François Millet’s birthplace in Gruchy (Gréville-Hague, Manche)—the family home has been faithfully reconstructed and furnished to resemble a 19th-century farmhouse. It is one of the most moving Millet sites to visit.

Millet’s home and studio in Barbizon —at No. 29 Grande Rue, where Millet lived from 1849 to 1875. It became a museum in 1922. Best visited in conjunction with Théodore Rousseau’s house (No. 55) and the Auberge Ganne, the founding sites of the Barbizon School.

Abroad:

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — owns the first version of *The Sower* (1850), often considered the definitive version.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — extensive collection of drawings and pastels.

Primary sources cited

Alfred Sensier, *The Life and Work of Jean-François Millet*, Paris, 1881 (published posthumously after Sensier’s death in 1877). A definitive edition of Millet’s writings and letters, edited by the man who was his friend, art dealer, and confidant for twenty-five years.
Millet-Sensier Correspondence, a collection of 708 letters held in the Department of Graphic Arts at the Louvre Museum (Moreau-Nélaton Collection, bequest of 1927).
Letters to Alfred Sensier, 1850 (quotations used in this article).

Leading Modern Studies

Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, *Millet as Told by Himself*, 3 volumes, Henri Laurens, Paris, 1921. The major modern documentary synthesis that established the corpus of his writings.
Robert L. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalog, Éditions des Musées nationaux, Paris, 1975. An academic reference work marking the centennial of his death.
Millet/Van Gogh, exhibition catalog published jointly by the Musée d’Orsay and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, edited by Louis Van Tilborgh and Marie-Pierre Salé.