The Life and Works of Jean-François Millet: An In-Depth Analysis
Explore the life and works of Jean-François Millet, a French painter known for his depictions of rural life and social commentary.
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Millet's paintings are socially conscious, denouncing injustices and inequalities, yet they also manage to envelop the harsh reality in an intense poetry thanks to the light that pours over them.
The Gleaners - Millet originally intended to depict the biblical story of Ruth, a widow who met Boaz, a landowner and relative who eventually became her husband, while she was working in the fields. The pictorial emphasis on the composition and the piles of grain behind them allows Ruth and Boaz to appear as peripheral figures to the central focus. What was emphasized is not the romantic story of faith from the Old Testament uniting two people, but rather a contemporary group of field workers hot and dusty resting from their work. Thus, the artist puts in focus the centrality of the common worker in the story and the scriptures.
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The Sower - At that time, French farmers followed a biblical directive to leave gleanings (or leftovers of the grain harvest) in the fields so that poor women and children could live off them. The Gleaners, in this case, are three women who occupy the extreme foreground of the canvas. The oppressive poverty of the peasant women is evident in their simple and rustic clothing, and the hard work of collecting individual grains appear as a contemporary representation of the biblical directive.
The Sower - The sense of vigorous movement in the painting is emphasized by the richness of dynamic angles that radiate out from its central figure. The small figure represented vaguely in the sunny horizon, leans back, its angular line emphasizing the descending movement even more. The placement of the daylight that radiates behind the sower, emphasizes the shadow of the foreground. His obscured eyes by his hat, his dirty clothes from his work, and the crows flying behind him, eating the seeds, destroying his efforts, all this creates the sense that he is a 'common man' trying to overcome the growing darkness. We can also observe to the right, a man behind a plow that leads his oxen team, preparing the soil for planting.
Shooting Starlings at Night - This is probably Millet's last work, which depicts four people hunting starlings at dusk. Two figures, one facing the viewer and the other facing the trees, use a torch to scare the birds and then run using sticks to hit the birds in the air. What is facing the viewer carries a large load of hay on their back to replenish the torch while it burns. Meanwhile, two additional figures rummage through the ground, collecting handfuls of fallen birds. The forest provides a dark green background for the macabre scene of illuminated birds flying frantically in all directions.
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