1814 -1875 · Gruchy, Cherbourg, Paris and Barbizon

Monumental peasant gestures, low horizons and deep light make Jean-François Millet the great painter of rural work in the 19th century.

Jean-François Millet was born in 1814 in Gruchy, into a peasant family in Cotentin. He knew directly the harvest, the care of the herds and the rhythm of the seasons before training in Cherbourg then in Paris. His beginnings included portraits and figures, but the revolution of 1848 and his installation in Barbizon in 1849 affirmed his essential subject: rural life. Millet paints neither folkloric anecdote nor empty landscape. The body at work organizes the painting. In The Sower, the long stride and the arm that disperses the grain give the peasant almost biblical power. Gleaners, presented at the Salon of 1857, are the result of approximately ten years of research. ears forgotten after harvest. Their curved backs occupy the foreground while in the distance the riches of the harvest accumulate. The difference in scale makes visible the condition of the rural proletariat without added speech. The Man with the Hoe, on the contrary, shows the stopping: the worker stands up for a moment, exhausted, in a land which seems to resist every gesture. The Potato Planters transform a repetitive task into a shared rhythm for a moment. The Potato Planters transform a repetitive task into a shared rhythm. Millet draws and paints hands, tools, clothes and postures for a long time. The Potato Planters transform a repetitive task into a shared rhythm. Millet draws and paints at length hands, tools, clothes and postures. Its chiaroscuro simplifies the shapes, its low horizon enlarges the figures and its earthy palette unites body and soil. The Angelus will give this gravity a dimension of meditation, but all of his work remains more complex than a simple Christian idealization. Admired by Van Gogh, naturalists and many modern artists, Millet died in Barbizon in 1875. He gave ordinary gestures a lasting monumentality. The "Jean-François Millet" selection notably compares Des gleaners and Le Semeur. His reading favors movement.

Millet does not enlarge the peasant with the emblem: he enlarges the real gesture, its repetition, its fatigue and the physical link between the body, the tool and the earth.