Among the great Realist artists of the nineteenth century, Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) was the peasant painter par excellence. While peasant themes formed the core of Millet’s oeuvre, his art was in fact quite diverse and eclectic in both subject matter and media, comprising portraits, nudes, and landscapes in paintings, drawings, and prints. Millet was born in 1814 in Gruchy, a rural hamlet near Cherbourg on the Normandy coast. His family were landowning peasants who fostered a love of reading and learning in their young son. In 1833 Millet began his artistic training in Cherbourg with the portrait painter Bon Dumouchel (1807–1846), a former pupil of David who encouraged his student to make copies of Old Masters in the local museum. In 1837, with funds provided by a municipal scholarship, Millet moved to Paris where he spent two years studying at the École des Beaux-Arts with the history painter Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), who described Millet as “dangerous” owing to his refusal to submit to Academic conventions. After a brief period back in Normandy, Millet returned to Paris in 1845 and earned a modest living as a painter of portraits and nudes.

Millet turned to peasant subjects with conviction in the late 1840s. Some praised the honesty of his portrayals of rural laborers while others decried the perceived radicalism thereof, not to mention the rough-hewn quality of his paint. It is vital to consider the larger sociopolitical context of Millet’s work: the mid-nineteenth century was a moment of transition and crisis in France as large numbers of peasants were migrating to cities and towns in search of a better life. This destabilizing trend meant that Millet’s images carried a political undercurrent that rankled conservatives. In 1849, during an epidemic of cholera in Paris, Millet moved to Barbizon with his second wife Catherine and their children. It was here that Millet made a series of works depicting the daily tasks of local peasants. Taken together, these works offer a kind of encyclopedia or almanac of farm chores, many of which were divided neatly along gender lines. 

During the 1860s Millet’s work shifted dramatically as he focused on landscapes, many made during extended periods in Vichy where his ailing wife took the waters. In a reversal from his earlier peasant pictures, in which he placed figures close to the foreground plane and enlarged their forms relative to the landscape setting, these works minimize the human presence or eliminate it altogether. The high horizon lines and expanses of untouched paper found in many of Millet’s late landscapes recall Japanese prints, which the artist collected with great enthusiasm at this time. At the very end of his life, following years of struggle and controversy, Millet finally attained both critical and commercial success. Millet died in 1875, one year after the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris. As Pissarro later observed, Millet had been a key defender of the “march of modern ideas” in art and helped lead the way forward for this new generation of independent artists.