Millet, Jean Francois

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

me-ya', Jean Francois (1814-1875), a noted French painter. He was born at Gruchy, near Cherbourg, October 4, 1814; he died at Barbizon January 20, 1875. He was educated at Cherbourg in the Academy of Design and won a scholarship that carried with it a sum sufficient to pay his expenses in the studio of Delaroche at Paris--this in 1837. For a time he painted Biblical subjects with but fair success. In 1848 he awoke to the fact that his heart lay in peasant subjects. He himself had not led a life of ease. He believed that he lost his young wife on account of the poverty-stricken way in which they were compelled to live. The turn in his art was marked by the appearance in the year named of The Winnower. He left Paris and took up his residence in a cottage at Barbizon, a village in the border of the forest of Fontainebleau. From that time on he produced painting after painting--The Sower, a powerful young peasant striding across the field scattering seed wheat by hand; Man Spreading Manure; The Reapers; The Gleaners; Death and The Woodcutter; and Feeding Her Birds. Reputation came slowly at first, but in 1859 his Angelus, potato diggers folding their hands and bowing their heads in prayer as the tones of the parish bell float across the field, sold at auction for $32,000. Other pictures followed. Quite a number were bought by wealthy Americans. The Water Carrier is owned by the Vanderbilts. W. C. Whitney purchased The Sower. Rockefeller purchased A Peasant Grafting a Tree. Other Millet paintings owned in America are The Turkey Tender, The Buckwheat Threshers, The Potato Planters, The Churners, The Potato Diggers, and Breaking Flax. The Angelus is considered Millet's masterpiece. The Man with the Hoe is most talked about. Millet left his cottage for Cherbourg during the Franco-Prussian War . Otherwise he lived among the peasants and painted them to the end. Other artists were attracted to the vicinity. The inns and cottages were thronged by artists who desired to see him at work, and Barbizon became for the time a center of greater interest than the studios of Paris. As an interpreter of peasant life, Millet is the greatest artist that has put brush to canvas. His subjects are French and local, but his paintings, like Burns' poems, appeal to the world. See Corot ; Bonheur ; Breton