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  • Jean-Francois Millet
    Oct 4, 1814 - Jan 20, 1875
  • Self-Portrait - 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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Self-Portrait
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  • Self-Portrait

  • Jean-Francois Millet
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  • about 1840-41
    Oil on canvas
    Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, United States.

    Millet's self-portrait at the age of about twenty-six connects him to advanced art circles in Paris, where he had arrived just three years before from his provincial home. His curled hair and velvet trimmed jacket were practically the uniform of the Romantic circle of French painters, who also favored the intensity of emotion conveyed by Millet's dark gaze. With a confident hand, the young artist announces his serious intentions, as well as his burgeoning talent.

    Millet was born in 1814 in the small farming community of Gruchy, in the Northeastern French region of Normandy. After studying Latin, literature, and other subjects with two village priests, he continued his education as an artist in the nearest city, Cherbourg. At the age of twenty-three, he received a stipend from the city of Cherbourg to move to Paris, where he studied at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His time in Paris was invaluable, but Millet missed the country, and when his scholarship ended he returned to Cherbourg to become a portrait painter. For some time he moved between Normandy and Paris, and eventually he decided to settle in Barbizon, a rural area not far from the capital. The village of Barbizon abuts the Forest of Fontainebleau and the flat agricultural Plain of Chailly. This is where Millet and his family remained for the rest of his life, with the exception of a year spent in Normandy during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and summer trips with his wife to the spa town of Vichy. Nonetheless, Millet visited Paris frequently and remained closely involved with the city's artistic culture.

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Other paintings by Jean-Francois Millet:

Seated Shepherdess
Seated Shepherdess
Seated Spinner (Emelie Millet)
Seated Spinner (Emelie Millet)
Sewing Lesson
Sewing Lesson
Shearing Sheep
Shearing Sheep
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.