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  • Jean-Francois Millet
    Oct 4, 1814 - Jan 20, 1875
  • Potato Planters - Jean-François Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers; he can be categorized as part of the naturalism and realism movements. As a painter of melancholy scenes of peasant labor, he has been considered a social realist. Millet's paintings are noted for their power and simplicity of drawing.
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Potato Planters
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  • Potato Planters

  • Jean-Francois Millet
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  • le Planteur de pomme de terres

    c.1861
    Oil on canvas
    82.5 x 101.3 cm (32 1/2 x 39 7/8 in.)
    Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, United States.

    In Millet's time, many people considered potatoes unfit food even for animals, but these peasants are planting potatoes for themselves to eat. "Why should the work of a potato planter," wrote Millet, "be less interesting or less noble than any other activity?" Millet gives the harsh reality of their lives beauty and dignity, placing his solidly modelled, harmonious figures before a hazy landscape just beginning to green in the spring sun. The presence of the donkey and the sleeping child under the tree may recall another poor working family, that of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus.

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Other paintings by Jean-Francois Millet:

Portrait of Pauline Ono
Portrait of Pauline Ono
Portrait of the Artist's Sister, Emily
Portrait of the Artist's Sister, Emily
Primroses
Primroses
Priory at Vauville, Normandy
Priory at Vauville, Normandy
Jean-Francois MilletJean-François Millet, who settled in Barbizon late in 1849, was born into a farming family. Trained with an academic painter in Paris, Millet devoted his early work to portraits and erotic nudes. He was sensitive to the changes brought about by the increasing urbanisation and industrialisation of France, and he was particularly inspired by the social issues raised by the Revolution of 1848. Thereafter he turned to scenes of peasants labouring, endowing them with heroic form adapted from the art of the past.

Unprecedented in French art, such works by Millet as The Sower were particularly controversial in the political climate of the time. Powerful and monumental, Millet's sower strides across a newly plowed field with energy and resolution, scattering the seeds for a new crop; he serves as an emblem of regeneration and of the elemental relationship between man and nature. Crude in appearance, the work provoked commentary not only on its subject matter but also on its styles and unorthodox technique. Théophile Gauteier, a famous nineteenth-century critic working for a government newspaper, noted that Millet "trowels on top of his dishcloth of a canvas, without oil or turpentine, vast masonries of coloured paint so dry that no varnish could quench its thirst". Political conservatives, who viewed the peasants as a potentially disruptive social element, attacked Millet, while liberals praised his ennoblement of rural life.

A nostalgia for an existence that was a dying phenomenon eventually made Millet's works some of the most famous images of their day. His paintings were exhibited widely, and he was revered on both sides of the Atlantic.

When Millet died in 1875, he was buried at Barbizon, next to Théodore Rousseau.