The eldest son of a respectable albeit modest peasant farmer, Millet was a French-born artist from a rural community in Gruchy, Normandy. At the age of nineteen Millet moved to Cherbourg to study painting before turning his sights to the Paris Salon in 1837 under a municipal fellowship and as a pupil of Paul Delaroche. By 1849 Millet found what would become his permanent home in Barbizon. Known mostly for his oils, Millet was also adept at working with pastels and Conté crayon (powered graphite or charcoal mixed with clay), as well as producing etchings. Millet spent much of his childhood tilling the land with his father, but during his time at school and with encouragement from his family developed a love of books – studying Latin, as well as reading Saint Augustine and Virgil, and being introduced to classic French literature. Millet’s spirituality informed much of his life and works, as did his early years labouring on the family’s land. Thus in Millet’s works we see inspiration from both the individuals with whom he spent his time as a child as much as the natural world in which he lived – with recurring themes of social class, labour, poverty and deprivation woven into the very fabric of the French landscapes and subjects he sketched and painted. Indeed, Millet himself wrote, ‘I try not to have things look as if chance brought them together, but as if they had a necessary bond between them’.

Summer – The Gleaners (before March 1853) is one of several preparatory sketches Millet made over the course of around seven years before completing perhaps one of his most well-known works The Gleaners (1857). Gleanings were the left-over scraps from the grain harvest, which were collected by poor women and children from farmland as a means to survive. This practice was a legally-enforced entitlement dating back to the bible as a means of distributing alms to the poor, and as such had ancient associations with charity, loyalty and community – although these ideals appear less assured in Millet’s unsettling portrayal of gleaners. Painting in the backdrop of France’s Revolution of 1848, Millet’s primary concern was to reflect the endless toil of the peasant classes – with whom he identified throughout his life. According to Robert Herbert it was due in part to the elevation of the ordinary man and woman during this period of civil unrest that Millet established ‘the essential character of his art and his life’ and through which he ‘came to celebrate the life of the peasant’. What might be considered Millet’s progressive social ideals were not, however, inspired by radical social and political views but were shaped instead by his personal experiences of an honest rural labouring life. Summer – The Gleaners is thus an example of nineteenth-century Realism, a movement that rejected idealised, sentimental and heroic representations of subject matter and which favoured, in stark contrast, depictions of the harsh realities of the everyday lives of the lower social classes.

Millet’s work also has much in common with a painting technique in which the artist paints ‘in the open air’ (en plein air), although unlike his peers Millet focussed less on the flora and fauna before him preferring instead to depict the hardships of the labouring classes within the landscape. A simple artistic approach used as far back as the Renaissance in preparation for studio painting, en plein air was later applied in the nineteenth century to reinforce a fidelity to nature. This technique placed much more emphasis on the artist as a creative labourer rather than exalted master. Typically associated with the Impressionist movement, this style of painting had previously been pioneered within the Barbizon School of central France of which Millet was co-founder alongside contemporaries including Théodore Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Édouard Manet. Artists using this process sought to capture a particular moment in time from a sensory perspective, drawing on the spontaneity of the artist’s individual emotional expression and thus claiming to remove intellectual artifice.

With Millet’s personal and artistic influences in mind, there are interesting compositional details to consider between Summer – The Gleaners and the completed oil painting, and which underscore the storm of controversy Millet faced by the time the finished painting was exhibited in the Salon of 1857. Whilst the prominence of the peasant women in the foreground of the sketch continues to arrest the viewer, in this early study Millet positioned the wheat ricks, laden waggon and labourers directly behind the gleaners in contrast to the considerable physical distance shown between them in the oil. Indeed, the great disparity between poverty and plenty in the finished painting is often considered explicit due to the compositional gulf between Millet’s subjects. Yet this juxtaposition of abundance and deprivation with its corresponding subtext of social inequity appears ever more present in the sketch, with the peasant women’s proximity to the wealth of the harvest sitting only feet away as they struggle anonymously for survival. Much has been written on the faceless anonymity of the women, whose homogeneity Millet used to represent all of the poverty-stricken peasant classes in France. Placing peasant women at the centre of his work Millet’s depiction of rural poverty was, however, considered a slight against the ruling classes with one critic denouncing his subjects as ‘dangerous beasts of prey, whose angry gestures threaten the very existence of society’. Such criticism came not only from the ashes of the Revolution but also, as Liana Vardi observes, from the contrast ‘between wealth and poverty, power and helplessness, male and female spheres’ that were forcefully rendered in both sketch and oil and which serve to further reinforce the marginalised status of the central figures.

Due to Millet’s sympathy for the peasant and repeated commentary on the lives of the poor his work challenged potential clients and led to only moderate acclaim in his lifetime, but as an artist profoundly moved by the human condition he succeeded in producing art that continues to move others today. The evolution of Millet’s gleaners from multiple sketches, etchings and to oil painting does not detract from his subjects’ social isolation, with Summer – The Gleaners remaining a striking portrayal of rural poverty, social displacement and the burdens of the poor in nineteenth-century France.

— Dr Helen Metcalfe

LITERATURE & FURTHER READING

• Cartwright, Julia, ‘The Drawings of Jean-François Millet in the Collection of Mr. James Staats-Forbes. Part I’, Burlington Magazine, 5:13 (1904), pp. 47-60.
• Fratello, Bradley, ‘The Intertwined Fates of “The Gleaners” and “The Angelus”, The Art Bulletin, 85:4 (2003), pp. 685-701.
• Hedberg, Gregory (ed.), Millet’s Gleaners (Minneapolis, Minnesota: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978).
• Herbert, Robert, ‘Millet’s Gleaners’, in Millet’s Gleaners (Minneapolis, Minnesota: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978), pp. 15-20.
• Herbert, Robert, ‘Millet Reconsidered’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 1 (1966), pp. 28-65.
• Herbert, Robert, ‘Millet Revisited – I’, The Burlington Magazine, 104:712 (1962), pp. 294-305.
• Herbert, Robert, ‘Millet Revisited – II’, The Burlington Magazine, 104:714 (1962), pp. 377-383 + 385.
• Meixner, Laura, ‘Popular Criticism of Jean-François Millet in Nineteenth-Century America’, The Art Bulletin, 65:1 (1983), pp. 94-105.
• theartstory.org/artist/millet-jean-francois/
• theartstory.org/definition//en-plein-air/
• Vardi, Liana, ‘Construing the Harvest: Gleaners, Farmers, and Officials in Early Modern France’, The American Historical Review, 98:5 (1993), pp. 1424-1447.