Millet: Life on the Land – an 'absorbing' exhibition

The Angelus by Jean-François Millet — The Angelus: Millet endows his subjects with heroic dignity

(Image credit: Musée d'Orsay)

"The case of Jean-François Millet's 1859 painting 'The Angelus' is one of the strangest in all art," said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Depicting two peasants pausing work in a field, called to prayer by a bell from a distant church spire, it shows the pair "heads bent in prayer, bodies haloed by golden evening rays" as shadows "lengthen over the spreading fields". This small, "modest" image has been held up as "the ideal image of la France profonde"; it has attracted endless, far-fetched critical scrutiny; it has repeatedly shattered auction records; and has been "used to advertise everything from cheap cigarettes to camembert". It marks a historical turning point – when the Industrial Revolution led to "a steady exodus of peasants from French farms to the city", and a nostalgia for the rural way of life; but the power of this "sonorous" work remains mysterious. Normally on display at Paris's Musée d'Orsay, "The Angelus" is currently the centrepiece of a small but fascinating – and free – exhibition at The National Gallery. Featuring several of the artist's most celebrated works, the show demonstrates how Millet (1814-1875) memorialised the forgotten peasant class, endowing the downtrodden rural labourers he painted with heroic dignity.

The son of wealthy Norman farmers who described himself as "the peasant's peasant", Millet saw the peasantry as "a class that had been denied full humanity", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. He painted "lives of backbreaking toil but wants you to see that, behind the hoe, is a human being with a mind, a body, desires". "The Faggot Gatherers", for instance, sees women lugging bundles of sticks through "Stygian gloom" in a scene "that could just as easily have been in the 1370s as the 1870s". The drawing "Man Ploughing and Another Sowing" has a "broken-looking" sower stumbling across the foreground as a flock of black crows rises into the sky. Looking at it, you can see why van Gogh was such a fan of Millet.

People have projected all sorts of readings onto Millet's art, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Salvador Dalí offered a "bizarre" Freudian interpretation of "The Angelus", while communist revolutionaries in 1930s China claimed his painting "The Sower" as their "icon". The latter work, also on display here, depicts "a huge, commanding figure" descending a slope, over which he throws seeds from a bag slung over his shoulder. Yet the artist himself "resisted political, religious and artistic labels". Certainly, his sympathy with the rural poor "is vital to his appeal", but just as important is his "theatrical" flair for constructing images. Nowhere is this clearer than in "The Angelus", in which the two figures are "firmly outlined, massive, silhouetted in a twilight glow", "frozen" in devotion as they recite the evening prayer. It's a bona fide "masterpiece" – and the highlight of this "absorbing" exhibition.