Millet says goodbye to the farmers of Cotentin

Barbizon : a hamlet on the northwest edge of the Fontainebleau forest. In 1875, it was populated only by loggers, farmers… and painters. This is where he just died, at 6 a.m. this morning. January 20, 1875 (so exactly 150 years ago today), the painter Jean-François Millet.

He died modestly in the modest house he has lived in here since 1849. It is there that he raised her 9 children with his wife Catherine Lemaire. And it is there that he accomplished the majority of his work, including his two world-famous masterpieces: THE Gleaners (1857) et The Angelus (1857-1859).

A gift, difficult beginnings

Born in Gréville in 1814 in a family of wealthy farmers, Jean-François Millet worked in the fields while taking the time to cultivate himself and begin to draw. Encouraged by his father, the young man goes down to Cherbourg to train with two local painters, Bon Dumoncel and Langlois de Chèvreville. The painting museum (future Thomas-Henry museum) has just opened and the two artists send their young student to study the paintings there and to practice copying them. Last local boost: the scholarship that the Cherbourg municipal council grants to young Millet so that he can study at Paris : because the young peasant definitely has talent. Beginning 1837Jean-François Millet arrives in Paris: he is 22 years old.

The beginnings were difficult, marked by production without character but which allowed it to survive. His young wife – Pauline Ono – whom he married in 1841, died of tuberculosis 3 years later. And it’s only from 1848-1849 (which coincides with his installation in Barbizon) that Jean-François Millet develops his work around the peasant world (The winnowerexhibited at the Salon of 1848).

“While working in the fields in the past”

If of course, it is inspired by peasant scenes that he observes in the countryside surrounding Barbizon for draw and paintJean-François Millet has not forgotten where he came from either: the peasant world of Hague a you Cotentin. A world he shared work and gestures when he was young, a world that he returns to see regularly to “recharge” or rebuild your health away from the harsh Parisian world.

In the small fields of La Hague, he dreams, he observes, he sketches multiple scenes and landscapes from life, garners lights, gestures, which he will later restore on his canvases. In his “winnower”among its harvesters, its sowers, there is certainly Cotentin. Besides, he makes no secret of it. When he speaks of The Angeluspainted between 1857 and 1859, JF Millet explains that he remembered “how, while working in the fields in the past, my grandmother never failed, when she heard the bell ring, to make us stop our work to say the Angelus for these poor dead, very piously and with hat in hand”.

This is how he too dies, “poor death”, “very pious” : three weeks before his death, he asked the priest of Barbizon to marry him religiously to Catherine Lemaire, whom he had married civilly in 1853.

And it was only several years after his death that finally Millet’s painting will be recognized like that of a great master, and that his paintings will be sold for gold… or will be reproduced endlessly on tin cans, post office calendars… The mark of a true painter of the people and popular.

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