Jean-François Millet

(Self-portrait)

French painter; b. at Gruchy, near Cherbourg, 4 October, 1814; d. at Barbizon,

20 January, 1875. This great painter of peasants was a son of peasants: he

himself began life as a tiller of the soil, and he never lost touch with it. But though

a family of rustics, the Millets were far removed from rusticity of manners: they

were serious folks, profoundly pious, a strange stock of Catholic Puritans whose

stern sentiments of religion, handed down from generation to generation, gave

them something like an aristocratic character; they were incapable of mean

ideas. The grandmother — the soul of that household — was an assiduous

reader of Pascal, Bossuet, Nicole, and Charron. Young Jean-François was

reared by the parish priest in the cult of Vergil and the Bible; the "Georgics" and

the Psalms, which he read in Latin, were his favourites. Later on he became

acquainted with Burns and Theocritus, whom he preferred even to Vergil. His

imagination never lost these majestic impressions. Nature and poetry, the open

country and Holy Scripture, shared equally in the shaping of his genius. Of that

genius the young ploughman gave the first signs at the age of eighteen. He

studied at Cherbourg under Langlois, a pupil of Baron Gros, and the Municipal

Council gave him a pension of 600 francs to go and finish his studies in Paris.

There he entered the atelier of Delaroche in 1837; but he spent most of his time

in the Louvre, with the masters of bygone ages.

The primitives of Italy enraptured him by their fervour: Fra Angelico filled him with

visions. The colourists were little to his taste; he remained unmoved in the

presence of Velazquez. But then again, he liked Ribera's vigour and Murillo's

homespun grace. Among the Frenchmen, the beauty of Le Sueur's sentiment

touched him, Le Brun and Jouvenet he thought "strong men". But his favourite

masters were the masters of "style" — Mantegna, Michelangelo, and Poussin:

they haunted him all his life. Poussin's "Letters" were his everyday food, and "I

could look at Poussin's pictures forever and ever", he writes, "and always learn

something". His contemporaries, Delacroix excepted, moved him but little and for

the most part to indignation. Millet's early works — those of his Paris period

(1837-50) — are extremely different from those which made him famous. They

are now very rare, but ought not to be forgotten: from the point of view of art, they

are probably his most pleasing and felicitous productions; in them the painter's

temperament voices itself most naturally before his "conversion", without method,

without ulterior purpose. They are generally idylls — eclogues — thoroughly rural

in feeling, with a frank, noble sensuality, the artist's Vergilian inspiration finding

expression in little pagan scenes, antique bas-reliefs, and neutral subjects, such

as "Women bathing", "Nymphs", "Offerings to Pan", and so on — thoughts but

slightly defined in forms as definite as sculpture.

Some of these pieces are the most Poussinesque things in modern art. In them

the young painter already appears as an accomplished stylist, with a Correggian

feeling for grace that was to be almost entirely lacking in his latest works. Here

he has powerfully expressed the joy of living as it might be known to a soul like

his — serious and robust, and always veiled in melancholy. His palette is

brighter and less embarrassed than it afterwards became; indeed, the colour is

sometimes even a little florid, as in the graceful portrait of Mlle Feuardent. On the

other hand, the severity of the modelling always saves his work from anything

like carelessness or lack of dignity. Some — like the charming pastel of

"Daphnis and Chloe" in the Boston Museum — are frankly reminiscent of Puvis

de Chavannes. But the beauty of these pastorals had not been very well

appreciated. To make a living, Millet was obliged to undertake base and ill-paid

work, painting signs for mountebanks and midwives. His "Oedipus taken down

from the tree", a study of the nude which excels as a piece of virtuosity and an

impression of savage wildness, rather shocked and astonished the public than

won admiration.

His difficulties increased more and more: having lost his first wife, he married

again in 1845, and with children came want. Matters were precipitated by the

Revolution of 1848. At first the Republican Government took an interest in the

artist, and he received some help from it; but the events of the month of June and

the disorders of the following year frightened Millet and inspired him with an

unconquerable dislike of Paris. He was beginning at last to understand his own

nature; he turned his back forever on the frivolous, worldly public. Without

disowning his earlier works, he addressed himself to another, newer and more

human, method of interpreting the things of the earth and the life of the rustic. In

the summer of 1849 he went to Barbizon, a little village about one league from

Chailly, on the borders of the Forest of Fontainebleau. He only meant to spend a

few weeks there; but remained for the rest of his life — twenty-seven years. From

that time Millet was Millet, the painter of peasants. It is impossible to recount in

detail all his life during the ten or fifteen years following his exodus into the

country, until his final triumph — to trace the long course of effort and of heroic

sacrifice, through which the name of a little obscure hamlet of the Ile-de-France

by the tenacity of a small group of painters was made one of the most famous

names in the art of all ages.

It was at Barbizon that Millet found Rousseau, who had been settled there for

some fifteen years, and with whom he became united in a truly memorable

friendship. Other painters — Aligny and Diaz — also frequented the village and

the now historic auberge of Père Gaune. The little band of pariahs lived in this

wilderness like anchorites of nature and art. Nothing could be more original than

this modern Thebaïd, so curiously analogous to the Port-Royal colony of

solitaries or the English Lake School. As a matter of fact, Englishmen and

Americans — a William Hunt or a Richard Hearn, a Babcock or a Wheelwright —

had the honour of being the first to comprehend this new art and to form an

admiring circle of neophytes and disciples about its misunderstood exponents.

Nevertheless, these were years of fierce struggle for the unfortunate painter.

Millet, with his large family (he had four sons and five daughters), knew what it

was to want for bread, for firewood, for the most indispensable necessities of life.

The baker cut off his credit, the tailor sent him summonses. The poor artist lived

in agonies of hunger, tormented by bailiffs, by distraint warrants, and by

humiliation. It is impossible to read the story of his sufferings without shedding

tears.

And yet it was just then that Millet, disgraced and baffled, shut out of the Salon,

unable to sell his pictures, was at the height of his genius. From these ten or

twelve years date the following immortal works: "The Sower" and "Haymakers"

(1850); "Harvesters", "Sheep-shearers" (1853); "Peasant grafting a tree" (1855);

"Gleaners" (1857); "The Angelus" (1859). To be sure, these admirable

achievements did not always meet with disparagement: Victor Hugo had written

in one of his famous poems: "Le geste auguste du semeur" (The sower's noble

attitude). The leading critics, Théophile Gautier and Paul de Saint-Victor, agreed

in recognizing the epic power of these peasant paintings. But the public still

resisted: repelled by the abrupt presentment, the rugged execution, the fierce

poesy, they insisted on seeing in these works pleas for democracy, socialistic

manifestos, and appeals to the mob. In vain did the painter protest: whether he

liked it or not, many made of him a revolutionary, a demagogue, a tribune of the

people. In the France of that day no one was able to understand what depth of

religion was here — to recognize in this sombre and pessimistic art the only

Christian art of our time. The only peasants then known to painting were

comic-opera peasants — the rude buffoons of Ostade and Teniers, or the

beribboned ninnies of Watteau and Greuze. They were always travestied in the

interests of romance or of caricature, burlesque or preciosity. No one had ever

ventured to show them in the true character of their occupations — the rough

beauty of the labour from which they derive their dignity.

The whole of Millet's work is but a paraphrase or an illustration of the Divine

Sentence: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread". "Every man", he

writes, "is doomed to bodily pain". And again, "It is not always the joyous side

that shows itself to me. The greatest happiness I know is calm and silence". But

at the same time, this harsh law of labour, because it is God's law, is the

condition of our nobility and our dignity. Millet is quite the opposite of a Utopian

or an insurgent. To him the chimeras of Socialism and the wholesale regulation

of the good things of life are impious, childish, and disgraceful. "I have no wish to

suppress sorrow", he proudly exclaims: "it is sorrow that gives most strength to

an artist's utterance". In his subsequent work, moreover, as if challenging the

world, he accentuated still further the ruggedness of his painting and the

harshness of his sentiment. The year 1863 marks the lowest point of this

depressed and misanthropic mood. Nothing ever exceeded his "Winter" in

desolateness, or his "Man with the Hoe" and "Vine-dresser resting" in sense of

utter exhaustion. The impression of physical fatigue reaches the point of

stupefaction and insensibility. The figures seem so thoroughly emptied of their

vital energy as to be petrified. The hard look is congealed into a grimace.

Nowhere has his effort, the forcing of his individual style to its utmost limit,

brought the great artist to results more harsh, more grandiose, or more

barbarous.

But things were getting quieter and easier for him. His extraordinary personality,

his eloquence, the strong conviction of this "Danubian peasant", were all making

themselves felt. The world was beginning to appreciate the loftiness of view and

the moral grandeur of this man of the fields with the lion's mane and the head of a

"Jupiter in wooden shoes". A relaxation came over his spirit and his ideas. He

travelled, rested, revisited his own part of the country, made short trips to

Auvergne, to Alsace, and to Switzerland. In 1868 he was made a chevalier of the

Legion of Honour — at fifty years of age. In 1870 he was elected a member of the

jury. But the great war, the death of his sister and of his dear friend Rousseau,

finally wrecked a constitution already injured by hard work and privation. During

the German invasion he and his family took refuge at Cherbourg near his native

home. After that time he almost ceased to paint. His latest pictures, the tragic

"November" (1870), the "Church of Gréville" (1872), and the incomparable

"Spring" (1873), are mere landscapes, with the human figure entirely absent.

Thenceforward he preferred simpler, more direct processes to that of painting,

using the pencil or pastel — like the great idealists, who always ended by

simplifying or minimizing the material medium and contenting themselves with

etching, as did Rembrandt, with drawing, as Michelangelo, or with the piano, as

Beethoven. These last works of Millet's are among his finest and most precious.

His colouring, formerly heavy and sad, often rusty and unpleasing, or sticky and

muddy, is here more delicate than ever before. Nowhere does one feel the

touching beauty of this artistic soul, and its masculine but tender eloquence,

more perfectly than in his studies and sketches. The finest collections of them

are in the possession of M. A. Rouart, in Paris, and of Mr. Shaw, in Boston.

Millet passed away at the age of sixty years and four months.

He was one of the noblest figures in contemporary art, one of those men who in

our day have done most credit to mankind. As a painter he was not without his

faults — somewhat clumsy in technique, not pleasing in colour, while emotion,

with him, does not always keep clear of declamation. These faults are most

palpable in his most famous works, such as "The Sower" and "The Angelus". But

on the other hand, so many others are perfect gems — marvels of execution and

poetic sentiment, like "The Morsel in the Beak" (La Becquée), "Maternal

solicitude", and "The Sheep-fold". Other painters have had more influence than

Millet. Courbet, for example, surpassed him in scope and in prodigious sense of

life; Corot, with just as much poetry, has in a higher degree the grace, the

charm, the exquisite gift of harmony. But who shall say that Millet's rugged

gravity was not the condition, the outward sign, of the deep import of his

message? No one has done more than he to make us feel the sanctity of life and

the mystic grandeur of man's mission upon the earth. His peasants, rooted to the

soil and as if fixed there for eternity, seem to be performing the rites of a sacred

mystery. One is conscious of something permanent in them, one feels how

intimately they are united with the great whole, their fraternal solidarity with the

rest of mankind and with the cosmic ends. Though he never handled professedly

religious subjects, Millet succeeded in being the most religious painter of our

times. His "Return to the Farm" irresistibly suggests the Flight into Egypt; his

"Repast" of harvesters, or of gleaners, evokes the Biblical poetry of Ruth and

Booz. On the river where his "Washerwomen" come and beat their linen, one

would think the cradle of Moses was floating. The greatness of his soul has set

in relief before our eyes the dignity of our nature; he has shown us how the trivial

can be made to serve in the expression of the sublime, and how the Infinite and

the Divine can be discerned in the humblest existence.

SENSIER, La vie et l'oeuvre de J.-F. Millet (Paris, 1881); IDEM, Souvenirs sur Th. Rousseau (Paris,

1872); PIÉDAGNEL, Jean-François Millet, Souvenirs de Barbizon (Paris, 1876); WHEELWRIGHT,

Recollections of Millet in Atlantic Monthly (Sept., 1876); BURTY, Maîtres et Petits-Maîtres (Paris,

1877); HUYSMANS, Certains (Paris, 1899); YRIARTE, J.-F. Millet (Paris, 1884); MICHEL, Notes sur

l'art moderne (Paris, 1896); CARTWRIGHT, J.-F. Millet (London, 1896); MOLLET, The Painters of

Barbizon, I (London, 1890); CHARAVET, Une lettre de Millet in Cosmopolis (April, 1898);

ROLLAND, J.-F. Millet (London, 1904); MARCEL, J.-F. Millet (Paris, 1908).

Louis Gillet

Transcribed by Richard Hemphill

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume X

Nihil Obstat, October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor

Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York

The Catholic Encyclopedia: NewAdvent.org