Gleaners millet jean francois biography

One of the most well known of Millet's paintings, The Gleaners (1857), was preceded by an earlier version, a vertical composition painted in 1854, and then by an etching of 1855-56 which directly presaged the horizontal format of the painting now in the Musee d'Orsay.

One of them is taking a pause, probably for having bent for an extended period. Rather than seeing it as a work of spiritual peace, Dali believed it held messages of repressed sexual aggression. The dark clouds and the shadowed bodies of the sheep act as brackets couching the scene from above and below, while the figure of the man and the shepherd's hut do the same from the sides, essentially funneling the viewer's gaze to the shepherd, and from him to the moon via his directional gaze.

Oil on canvas - The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

1860-62

Man with a Hoe

Man with a Hoe depicts a fieldworker as he leans over, clearly exhausted from his labors, his hands upon his hoe.

Artists such as Giotto, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Raphael utilized this same strategy, along with the use of atmospheric perspective and diminution of figures to indicate deep special recession. He also learned other aspects of country life, as he was challenged to fight by older boys at school, and worked long days on his family's farm.

Consequently, many of his detractors saw him as an unspoken social critic with a leftist viewpoint, as were fellow RealistsHonoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet. On the left, a man presents a woman to the group. The three women are shown bent over, so they do not pierce the horizon, confirming that what we are born into is where we stay.

As muscular and heroic as Michelangelo's figures, and looming over the landscape like Goya's giants, the figure occupies much of the foreground, dominating the canvas. (1898), in which he is depicted as a struggling young artist who fakes his death to score fame and fortune. The following year Frederic Hartmann commissioned Four Seasons for 25,000 francs, and Millet was named Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur.

In 1870 Millet was elected to the Salon jury.

His somber sensibility was fundamentally shaped by rural work, as he said, "I have never seen anything but fields since I was born, I try to say as best I can what I saw and felt when I was at work."

Early education and training

Recognizing his talent for drawing, his family sent him to Cherbourg in 1833 to study portrait painting.

Millet saw his share of successes and failures with both critics and the public.

The famous American poet, Walt Whitman, said of his ground-breaking Leaves of Grass," The Leaves are really only Millet in another form - they are the Millet that Walt Whitman has succeeded into putting into words." The theory of noted critic and author John Berger was influenced by Millet's work, writing that "Millet, without a trace of sentimentality, told the truth as he knew it."

Millet also had an inadvertent impact upon the laws affecting the art world.

Millet was to live in Barbizon the rest of his life and his primary friendships were with the artists who also lived there. Therefore, they taught and encouraged realism, which was inspired by the new wave of renaissance that was sweeping across France. Consequently, his practice impacted markedly the methods of many later painters, photographers, and writers who saw Millet as an inspiration, mentor, and friend.

Accomplishments

• Raised in a deeply religious rural farming family, Millet saw the peasant-class as most nobly fulfilling the words of the Old Testament Book of Genesis 3:19, which read: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." This served as a subtext in most of his paintings throughout his Barbizon years.
• While most artists of the Barbizon school concentrated on landscapes painted en plein air, Millet preferred to depict the life of ceaseless toil required of the peasant class, a social stratum for which he had great respect.

  The painting's sense of vigorous movement is underscored by the wealth of dynamic angles that radiate outward from its central figure.

  

  On January 3, 1875 he married Catherine in a religious ceremony. Such techniques were not new to art and had been used to great effect by painters of the Renaissance including Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, etc., albeit with different intentions. Each woman is depicted engaged in a specific task; one searches for stray grain on the ground, one collects the grains and the third ties them all together.

  Unlike most of his works that focused on the laborer at work in the fields, this painting features the primal landscape itself.