Title: Study of Peasants Pitching Fruit
Medium: Pencil on paper
Size: 2.75" x 3.75"
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Note: Conservation framed and glazed

Millet, Jean-Francois (1814-1875)

French painter and graphic artist, born of a peasant family at Gruchy, near Cherbourg in Normandy. He studied locally, then in 1837 entered the studio of Delaroche in Paris. His early pictures consisted of conventional mythological and anecdotal genre scenes and portraits, but with The Winnower (Musee & Orsay, Paris), exhibited at the Salon in 1848, he turned to the scenes of rustic life from which his name is now inseparable.

He emphasized the serious and even melancholy aspects of country life, emotionalizing the labours of the soil and the sad solemnities of toil. Hostile critics accused him of being a socialist, but Millet's concerns were aesthetic rather than political and he said his desire was 'to make the trivial serve to express the sublime'. In 1849 he settled at Barbizon, where he remained for the rest of his life apart from a stay in Cherbourg during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-l. Late in his career he turned increasingly to pure landscape, influenced by his close friend Theodore Rousseau. Millet passed much of his life in poverty, but his work began to bring him success in the 1860s and The Angelus (Musee d' Orsay, 1859) became perhaps the most widely reproduced painting of the 19th century. This has had a harmful effect on his subsequent critical fortunes, for largely on the strength of it he has been pigeon-holed as a purveyor of pious sentimentality. His greatness lies rather in his drawing, which for its elimination of the inessential, investing the ordinary with weight and dignity, has been compared with that of Seurat. Van Gogh and Camille Pissarro were among those who admired Millet's work, He has long been particularly popular in the USA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has an outstanstanding collection of his work.