Relatively unknown in France as one of the pioneers of modernism, the work of Jean-François Millet has nevertheless had a major influence on the art world of the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and the United States. Vincent van Gogh, Terrence Malick or even Banksy: they are indeed (very) numerous those who were inspired by the leader of the Barbizon school.
This is how the Van Gogh Museum nicknamed the Norman painter during a retrospective in 2019. A tribute to one of his most famous paintings but also a reference to his peasant origins because, before becoming a major artist of the 19th century, Jean-François Millet was a shepherd and then a farmer in a family of landowners.
His precocious gift for drawing allowed him to be apprenticed to a painter in Cherbourg before joining the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the capital he could admire the work of great artists (Poussin, Michelangelo, Delacroix...) who influenced his style even if it remained unique and atypical for the time: Millet was indeed the first to dare to paint rural life, a theme historically considered not noble enough.
This non-conformism was also illustrated in the form: innovative compositions, raw pictorial touch, life-size formats (normally reserved for history painting). In order to show the peasants whose daily life he continued to share throughout his life, he completely freed himself from academicism and thus opened the way to many artists. We can mention Edgar Degas with his immersion in the life of the modest dancers of the Opera, Camille Pissaro and his rural scenes (below) or Paul Gauguin and his sublimation of the preserved way of life of Polynesia (on the left).
Painting
As a witness to the harsh life of Dutch farmers and Belgian miners, the sensitivity of the young Vincent Van Gogh could not but find an echo in the work of Millet with whom he also shared a great humanity and humility. Like his master, the pioneer of post-expressionism also preferred the company of modest people to worldliness and was a convinced "plein-airist", his inspiration coming almost exclusively from nature with, as with Millet, a progressive tendency to minimize the human presence in his landscapes.
If one can detect the influence of the French painter in the whole of the work of the Dutch artist, one painting in particular leaves no doubt: "The Sower at Sunset" where he takes up, by enlarging the frame, the posture of the character painted 38 years earlier by Millet.
For me it is not Manet, it is Millet the painter essentially
painter to whom the horizon opened before many
Photograph
Along with the Angelus, the painting of the Gleaners is one of Millet's most famous and inspired the American photographer Lewis Hine, who, in keeping with his fight to raise awareness of child labor, produced a version of it featuring black women and a little girl harvesting strawberries. In the same vein of sensitizing public opinion to the sad fate of certain categories of the American population, Dorothea Lange and her iconic photo "migrant mother" is also part of the artistic filiation with Millet. Taken in 1936, this photograph, which has become the symbol of the Great Depression in the United States, pays tribute to the poorest of the poor, those left behind by the industrial revolution and triumphant urbanism.
Two themes that did not interest the "peasant painter" either, although they were much treated in art by their contemporaries.
Cinema
Ochre tones, silhouettes against the light, a composition leaving a large place to the natural elements: no doubt, the film "Days of heaven" by Terrence Malick is inspired by the aesthetic universe but also thematic of Millet. In both artists, rural life and religious piety are indeed very present and the director of The Tree of Life readily acknowledges the influence of the French painter on his work. Work that has, more recently, influenced in turn filmmakers like Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) or M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Village). A posterity that Millet, who died before the invention of cinema, would certainly not deny today.
Perhaps he would also be flattered to see that the most famous of street artists, Banksy, has revisited his Gleaners by proposing the hijacked version below.
Definitely timeless this Jean-François Millet!
Valerie from Comme des Français
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