Jean Lois Millet Research Paper

Brooke Camardelle

Art History 1441

April 15,2015

Jean-François Millet

The Gleaners, 1857, oil on canvas

Jean-François Millet was born on October 4, 1814 in Normandy to Jean-Louis-Nicolas and Aimée-Henriette-Adélaïde Henry Millet. The Family were farmers in the farming village of Gruchy. He learned about Latin and modern others with the help from two village priests. He was sent to Cherbourg to study with a portrait painter by the name of Paul Dumouchel in 1833, at the age of 19. Lucien-Théophile Langlois, another pupil in Cherbourg, began studying with Millet. Soon, a stipend was provided by Langlois and some others that allowed Millet to move to Paris in 1837. There, he studied with Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Upon return, he married Pauline-Virginie Ono and moved back to Paris. After Pauline’s death from tuberculosis and rejections from the Salon of 1843, Millet once again returned to Cherbourg. Two years later he moved to Le Havre and married Catherine Lemaire. Together, they would have nine children. Millet painted portraits for several months before moving his family back to Paris.In the middle of the 1840s, Millet befriended Narcisse Diaz, Charles Jacque, Constant Troyon, and Théodore Rousseau. These artists, like Millet, founded the Barbizon school, Honoré Daumier. Honoré Daumier influenced Millet’s portraits of peasant subjects. In June of 1849, Millet and Catherine settled down in Barbizon with their nine

Gleaning was mostly done by young children or poor women. The Gleaners is one of the most well-known of Millet’s paintings. The painting depicts three peasant women in a field picking up the leftover grain from the harvested wheat crops. One morning in Barbizon, Millet was walking the fields and came across the act. He often linked this to stories from the Old Testament. According to the Holiness code and Deuternomic Code of Torah, farmers should not harvest the corners of their harvest or the grain left behind. This act is for the poor and the strangers. In the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples gleaned as they passed through grain fields, breaking the heads of wheat to eat. He submitted The Gleaners to the Salon of 1857 to an unenthusiastic, hostile crowd. It drew much negative attention from the middle and upper classes of France. These higher classes viewed the paintings as glorifying the working class. Having recently come from the French Revolution of 1848, the lower working classes used it as a reminder that the basis of France were built from the labor put in by them. The depicted gleaners made the upper classes feel uneasy. The numbers of people classified as working extremely outnumbered the members of the upper