Believing that the lives of ordinary people are as worthy of artistic representation as those of the rich and powerful, Millet had a profound influence on the art of Vincent van Gogh in particular.
Jean-François Millet was the first person to depict the peasants in all their reality, who was the subject of his paintings, which art history has ignored for centuries.
Jean-François Millet (4 October 1814 – 20 January 1875) was a French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his paintings of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the Realism art movement. Toward the end of his career, he became increasingly interested in painting pure landscapes. He is known best for his oil paintings but is also noted for his pastels, conte crayon drawings, and etchings.
The first years
Jean-François Millet was born in Gruchy, a small coastal town in Normandy, in 1814. As a small landowner in this region, his family earned all his income by cultivating the land. Even though the nation had a struggling childhood like every child living in the countryside, they had a happy and devoted family. He could go on tilling forever; but realizing that his artistic skills were far more impressive than his agricultural abilities, his parents wanted their son to be educated.
At the age of 19, he went to Cherbourg, a few hours from his village, with his father to look for a master, and began an apprenticeship with a local master, Paul Dumouchel (1807-1846). Two years later he was accepted into the studio of Lucien-Théophile Langlois (1802-1845), a student of the famous painter Antoine-Jean Gros. Working alongside Langlois on portraits and biblical scenes, he also copied paintings by Spanish masters he had just discovered in museums. But for a promising young painter, the city's opportunities were limited. Aware of his student's talent, Langlois enabled Millet to go to Paris, the center of the arts, by receiving a scholarship from the Municipality of Cherbourg.
Paris salons
Millet, who came to Paris in 1837, attended the lessons of Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), the most popular history painter of that time, at the Academy of Fine Arts (Ecole des Beaux-Arts). However, Delaroche's academic painting style did not match the painting understanding of Millet, who came from the provinces. While Delaroche was doing everything according to the book with his idealized magnificent historical paintings, Millet wanted to bless the labor of the villagers who struggled with the difficulties of rural life. Moreover, because he was a peasant, he was the subject of ridicule among the students of the workshop. For this reason, he began to breathe in the halls of the Louvre Museum, which he saw as a savior island whenever he had the chance. Although he felt socially alienated, he felt lucky to have gained experiences that he could not learn from anyone else while studying old masters such as Mantegna, Michelangelo, Poussin, and Rembrandt.
After two years in Paris, he wanted to try his luck at the Prix de Rome, France's most prestigious competition for young artists but was unsuccessful. This was a breaking point for the Nation. In his first years in Paris, he had to paint romantic portraits in line with the taste of the period, both in the hope of making himself accepted in the art world and in order to earn money. However, being known for these paintings was not suitable for someone who said he wanted to remain a peasant for the rest of his life. While the nation was seeking to establish its artistic style in the mid-1840s, he fell under the influence of the Realist painter Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), whose art was about ordinary people. When he started to give the first examples of his works that showed the natural beauty of the countryside, he caught the attention of the naturalist landscape painter, who met in the village of Barbizon, at the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest, under the leadership of Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867).
Barbizon
Fleeing the cholera epidemic in Paris in 1849, Millet and his family settled in Barbizon, a small village where a naturalist artists' colony congregated. Following the ideas of John Constable, the "Barbizon School" mostly depicted rural landscapes, combined with a new eye for nature and a desire to go beyond the rules of academic composition. Millet's focus was on the representation of the figure in the landscape. He took long walks in the countryside every day to observe the villagers better, and he returned to his essence by cultivating the land on his own land, as he had done in his childhood.
While the French saw him as a political threat
By the mid-1850s, his new work began to attract attention from American collectors, unlike his French compatriots, who saw his paintings as a political threat. In this way, when he got rid of the poverty he had suffered for years, it was time to produce his masterpieces that glorified rural aesthetics. "The Spike Collectors", which he exhibited at the 1857 Salon, represented the pinnacle of his art, although it was subjected to intense criticism. Although critics still questioned his choice of subject, no one doubted his talent any longer. The Legion of Honor award he received from the French government after his nine works took place in the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition, and the recognition of his art for years was like an appreciation of his struggle against official institutions.
And like everything else…
After the 1860s, Millet began to be interested in atmospheric and landscape paintings that heralded the Impressionism movement and gradually moved away from his figure-based works. Although he continued to paint until the last moment of his life, Millet's health gradually deteriorated after his anxiety over the invasion of France and the death of his dear friend Theodore Rousseau. He died in Barbizon on January 20, 1875, and was buried next to Theodore Rousseau in Chailly cemetery.
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Works:
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/millet-jean-francois/