Each Jean-François Millet oil painting is hand-painted with oil on linen canvas, created by one of HandmadePiece's professional painters. Museum quality with preview before shipment. Global free shipping.
"I have avoided (as I always do with horror) anything that might verge on the sentimental." - Jean-François Millet
Best known for his scenes of humble, pious peasants working in the fields, Millet lived in the village of Barbizon and associated with the BARBIZON SCHOOL painters who worked around the Forest of Fontainebleau, but he is not strictly a Barbizon landscapist. The historian Kermit Champa argues that Millet and his friend Theodore ROUSSEAU, a founder of the Barbizon group, are "two halves of one artist." Where Rousseau evokes human presence and feeling in his landscape paintings, Millet's human figures, natural and at home on the earth, evoke the character of their landscape environment. From a fairly well-to-do family of pious Norman peasants himself, Millet studied in Paris with DELAROCHE. His paintings of toiling peasants created a sensation at the SALONS of the 1850s. Because of his subject matter, the police were asked to check his credentials before he received a state-sponsored commission. Any suspicions that he was politically radical were wrong. As his contemporary biographer Alfred Sensier wrote, "Millet had never caused any trouble in any way, he seemed to be quite satisfied with simply painting, staying very quietly at home, or walking around gazing at the sky, the fields, and the trees." His own politics aside, antiestablishment writers approved and admired the moralizing they chose to find in Millet's paintings. They saw it in paintings like The Sower (c.1850), in which a laborer is casting seeds onto the field. This picture represents a way of life that was succumbing to changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The writer Alexandre Dumas pere equated Millet's critical reception to that of COURBET some years earlier-indignation on the one hand, admiration on the other-and concluded that a mediocre artist would not prompt such reaction.
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