Until the mid-19th century, art’s relationship with the pastoral had largely been a well-mannered thing. And then it took a turn. The piping shepherds of Virgil’s Eclogues painted by Claude, Poussin, Domenichino and a host of classical landscapists gave way to a vision of the countryside that was about agriculture rather than Arcadia, labour rather than idyll. There was a long tradition of realistic portrayals of the sweat and toil of country life – Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Seasons of the 1560s, for example, depicted cattle drovers battling the wind and exhausted corn harvesters in a midday slump – but a dreamier and more poetic strand dominated down the centuries. Even when George Stubbs painted seemingly from-life images of haymakers and reapers in 1785, his rustics are as decorous as an antique frieze with not a hair out of place or a sweat patch to darken their muslins.
Then, in France, in the middle years of the next century, artists began to look more closely at the truth of country life. They tended to be adherents of realism, a new style that had grown in part as a reaction to the unreality of romanticism, and which set itself against idealisation, demanding instead objectivity and modernity. It was fed by the heightened political tensions that saw the overthrow of the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1830, the economic depression of 1846 and the abdication of King Louis Philippe two years later.
So, in 1849, when Gustave Courbet started work on his monumental painting of two labourers smashing rocks, The Stone Breakers, he intended to depict not the dignity of labour but the indignity. The picture’s size and tight focus – no pleasing landscape to be seen, just a scruffy bit of roadside – made their muscle-aching grind inescapable. For the few, the countryside might offer bucolic pleasures, but for the many it was a place of poverty and hardscrabble work.
If Courbet, a political radical who would be imprisoned with the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871, offered an unflinching version of rural existence, Jean-François Millet (1814-75) presented a no less potent but more comfortable alternative. Unlike Courbet, Millet knew about agricultural work first hand, having been born into a Normandy farming family and brought up to work the land. For him, agricultural labourers were not an abstract group or living illustrations of a partisan viewpoint but real people, of whom he was one. “I am a peasant among peasants,” he said.
Millet is the subject of the National Gallery’s latest exhibition, a show focusing on his depictions of “Life on the Land”. Rural scenes were not his only topic, however; he had a traditional training in Cherbourg and then Paris with the intention of becoming a portraitist. It was lack of success in this field – one portrait was returned to him because of its poor likeness – and in mythologies that led him to look to the countryside for topics.
In 1848, the year of revolutions, he painted his first labourer, The Winnower, which was bought by Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, minister of the interior in the new republican government. It was this painting that inspired Courbet’s The Stone Breakers and that Théophile Gautier lip-curlingly lauded as containing “everything it takes to exasperate the bourgeois with hairless chins”. However overt the political message (though Millet refused to label himself a socialist), there was something else at play in the picture. This solitary man, back bent and muscles flexed as he tosses grain in the air, is also a representation of la France profonde – an archetype who, although dressed in the sabots and homespun of the contemporary rural poor, is a timeless figure, as familiar in antiquity as in the mid-19th century. What is less often noted is the painterliness of the image – the creaminess of the paint, the solidity of the figure picked out by a shaft of light that pierces the barn and turns the flying corn into a waft of gold.
With his move to Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau in 1849, the peasantry became his dominant theme. In such a place, inequality was manifest. In a letter of 1851, Millet wrote that: “You are seated under the trees experiencing all the well-being, all the tranquillity that you can enjoy; then you catch sight, coming down a little footpath, of a poor figure laden with a faggot.” The sight, he said, instantly “takes you back unwillingly to the unhappy condition of mankind, to the fatigue”.
He responded with an art of reduction: unadorned landscape, faces distinct but rarely individualised, simplified clothing, legible and utilitarian movement (gleaning, log sawing, walking to the fields, sowing corn), and usually no more than two figures. As a result, for all the mundanity of their tasks, his labourers assume a certain monumentality: he offered nowhere else for the eye to go than their bulky, frequently silhouetted forms. This groundedness was partly the result of his method: although he disliked working outside, he did make drawings, and these, with the overlay of visual memory and his own experience of agricultural work, gave the figures their presence.
These tendencies were best represented in his celebrated painting The Angelus (1859), depicting two peasants in a field pausing in their harvesting of potatoes to answer the distant church bell’s summons to prayer (it is the church of St Paul’s at Chailly-en-Bière, where he would later be buried). Millet himself recalled doing this as a boy on the family farm and it is a picture that makes overt the religiosity sensed rather than stated in many of his paintings. “The human side of art is what touches me most,” he wrote, and his pair of heads-bowed figures express a simple but profound faith – and to some of the painting’s viewers a stoic acceptance of their lot that amounted to a statement of the natural order of human society.
While Camille Pissarro would later dismiss the picture as a work of “idiotic sentimentality”, another critic thought that in the image: “The sonorous waves from the steeple mix… with the fluid waves of air, with the vibrations of light and colour, and the heartbeats of the artist.” The young Van Gogh, before he became a painter, wrote to his brother Theo that: “That painting by Millet, L’Angélus du soir, that’s it, indeed – that’s magnificent, that’s poetry.” And Salvador Dalí believed it to be “the richest in unconscious thoughts that ever existed”, discerning in it not just a sexual drama (the husband covering his genitals to protect himself against castration by a wife with the outline of a praying mantis) but a couple mourning the death of their son. That it was a significant work, whatever exactly it might mean, was not in doubt: in 1889, the painting was sold at auction for 553,000 francs, then a record price for a modern picture.
Other painters, such as George Clausen and Jules Bastien-Lepage, would find inspiration in Millet’s work and adopt his themes. However, they added a naturalism that would in turn dilute the numinousness that was a potent feature of his pictures.
Meanwhile, there was one more task for Millet’s rural beasts of burden to perform: in return for his paintings depicting the quiet dignity of their lives, they helped their one-time fellow son of the soil to financial comfort and the Légion d’honneur.
Millet: Life on the Land
The National Gallery, London WC2. Until 19 October
[See also: Trade unionist Joe Rollin: “Orgreave was a trap, and we fell for it”]
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This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025