Jean-François Millet

Jean-François Millet (born 4 October 1814 in Gréville-Hague, Normandy; died 20 January 1875) was a French painter and a founding figure of the Barbizon school, a group of artists based in rural France. He is best known for depicting peasant farmers and is considered part of the Realism movement. Later in his career, he focused more on pure landscapes. Though famous for his oil paintings, he also worked in pastels, Conté crayon drawings, and etchings.

Millet grew up on a family farm in the village of Gruchy, near the Normandy coast. As the eldest son, he helped with all kinds of farm work—mowing, haymaking, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, spreading manure, plowing, and sowing—tasks that would later appear in his art. Two local priests, including vicar Jean Lebrisseux, taught him Latin and modern literature. In 1833, his father sent him to Cherbourg to study under portrait painter Bon Du Mouchel. By 1835, he was studying with Théophile Langlois de Chèvreville, a pupil of Baron Gros. With a stipend from Langlois and others, Millet moved to Paris in 1837 to study at the École des Beaux-Arts under Paul Delaroche. His scholarship ended in 1839, and his first Salon submission, *Saint Anne Instructing the Virgin*, was rejected.

After a portrait was accepted at the 1840 Salon, Millet returned to Cherbourg to work as a portraitist. He married Pauline-Virginie Ono in 1841 and moved to Paris. Following rejections at the 1843 Salon and Pauline’s death from consumption in April 1844, he went back to Cherbourg. In 1845, he moved to Le Havre with Catherine Lemaire, whom he married in a civil ceremony in 1853; they had nine children and stayed together for life. In Le Havre, he painted portraits and small genre pieces before returning to Paris.

In the mid-1840s, Millet befriended artists who would also join the Barbizon school: Constant Troyon, Narcisse Diaz, Charles Jacque, and Théodore Rousseau. He also connected with Honoré Daumier, whose figure drawing influenced Millet’s peasant subjects, and Alfred Sensier, a government official who became his lifelong supporter and biographer. His first Salon success came in 1847 with *Oedipus Taken down from the Tree*, and in 1848, the government bought his painting *The Winnower*. That same year, his ambitious work *The Captivity of the Jews in Babylon* was ridiculed by critics and the public. It later disappeared, leading historians to think Millet destroyed it. In 1984, x-rays at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston revealed that his 1870 painting *The Young Shepherdess* was painted over *Captivity*, likely because materials were scarce during the Franco-Prussian War.

In 1849, Millet painted *Harvesters* for the state and exhibited *Shepherdess Sitting at the Edge of the Forest* at the Salon—a small oil that marked a shift from idealized pastoral scenes to a more realistic, personal style. That June, he settled in Barbizon with Catherine and their children. In 1850, he made a deal with Sensier: the bureaucrat provided materials and money in exchange for drawings and paintings, while Millet could still sell to others. At that year’s Salon, he showed *Haymakers* and *The Sower*, his first major masterpiece and the earliest of three iconic works that would include *The Gleaners* and *The Angelus*.

From 1850 to 1853, Millet worked on *Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz)*, which he considered his most important painting and the one he spent the longest on. Intended to rival Michelangelo and Poussin, it marked his shift from symbolic peasant imagery to contemporary social conditions. It was the only painting he ever dated and earned him his first official recognition—a second-class medal at the 1853 Salon. In the mid-1850s, he produced a few etchings of peasant subjects, including *Man with a Wheelbarrow* (1855) and *Woman Carding Wool* (1855–1857).

*The Gleaners* (1857) is one of Millet’s most famous works. For seven years, he repeatedly sketched and painted the theme of gleaning—the traditional right of poor women and children to collect leftover grain after the harvest. He saw it as an eternal subject, linked to Old Testament stories. When he submitted the painting to the 1857 Salon, the public and critics reacted with hostility. Earlier versions include a vertical composition from 1854 and an etching from 1855–56 that foreshadowed the horizontal format of the final painting, now in the Musée d’Orsay. During his studies, Millet focused on conveying the repetitive fatigue of peasant life: lines tracing each woman’s back lead to the ground and rise again, mirroring their endless, backbreaking labor. On the horizon, the setting sun silhouettes a farm with abundant grain stacks, contrasting with the large shadows of the gleaners.