A new exhibition at London's National Gallery brings together works by Jean-François Millet, offering visitors an intimate look at the harsh realities and quiet dignity of 19th-century French rural life. "Millet: Life on the Land" features the famous painting "The Angelus" (1859) alongside other works that illuminate the strict social divisions, daily routines, and profound isolation experienced by agricultural workers in mid-1800s France.
"The Angelus" serves as the centerpiece of this modest but deeply moving exhibition. The widely recognized painting depicts two farm workers - a man and a woman - standing with bowed heads in a potato field as they recite the evening Angelus prayer. Their tools lie temporarily abandoned as they pause from their labor for this brief moment of spiritual reflection. The painting's most striking feature is its luminous quality of light, with layers of pink and gold gradually transforming into bruise-like gray tones, while the final traces of daylight blue remain visible on the left side of the canvas.
The National Gallery has assembled this collection by bringing together "The Angelus" from Paris's Musée d'Orsay with various Millet paintings and sketches from galleries across England, Scotland, and Wales. This thoughtful curation provides crucial context for understanding the lives of the two main figures in "The Angelus" and connects them with other characters from the same agrarian community in Barbizon, located in the Seine-et-Marne region of northern France.
One of the exhibition's most revealing aspects is how it illustrates the rigid gender segregation that characterized 19th-century rural society. "The Angelus" stands as the only work in the entire display that shows men and women together. All paintings positioned to the left of this central piece depict men exclusively, while those on the right show only women, creating a visual representation of the era's strict social boundaries.
The men's work involved the most physically demanding tasks of farm life: sowing seeds, plowing fields, hauling heavy loads, winnowing grain, chopping wood, sawing lumber, and splitting logs. "The Wood Sawyers" (1850-2) particularly captures this brutal physical reality, showing two men working to saw through an enormous log. One worker has his back turned to viewers, revealing the intense strain and tension visible in his ham-like thighs and powerfully built, muscular calves. Millet's artistic technique makes these laborers appear almost animal-like in their strength and endurance, with hoof-like wooden clogs and massive, paw-like hands that seem nearly as large as their heads.
Millet's masterful brushwork allows viewers to almost feel the sweat, hear the groans of exertion, and sense the wooden splinters flying from their tools. The men's movements are expansive and dynamic, with bodies stretched outward as they raise axes high, stride purposefully across fields, extend their arms, and bend their knees to carry impossibly heavy burdens.
In contrast, the women's gestures appear much more contained and restrained, reflecting the social expectations and proper decorum of the time. Their hands are neatly positioned on walking staffs in front of them or clasped against their chests as they carry large bundles of sticks on their backs. While some of these female figures might appear to have stepped off a decorative chocolate tin, any romantic sentimentality would be completely misplaced in interpreting their reality.
Millet's female subjects, whether young or elderly, were never excused from the grinding drudgery of farm work. His paintings show them tending cattle, sheep, and geese, washing out milk pails, and performing the back-breaking labor of gleaning - picking up leftover crops after harvest and gathering branches for fuel. A particularly poignant sketch from the early 1850s titled "A Shepherdess" shows a young woman knitting while simultaneously watching over her sheep, maximizing her productivity while perhaps seeking some small relief from the crushing boredom of a life that remained exactly the same every single day.
Many of Millet's figures, especially the women, are portrayed in complete solitude. Even when multiple figures appear in group scenes, meaningful communication seems entirely absent. When one man plows while another sows seeds, they work in isolation, keeping strictly to themselves. Groups of women carrying enormous bundles of sticks on their backs trudge along one behind another, never walking side by side in conversation. Once again, "The Angelus" proves to be the sole exception - it remains the only image in the entire exhibition where people are shown actually communing with each other and sharing a moment of connection. The profound loneliness and isolation of this rural existence becomes almost palpable to viewers.
Millet's artistic palette favored muted earth tones - browns and greens predominantly - while his brushstrokes often created a deliberately soft-focus, almost blurred visual effect. Facial features were admittedly not among Millet's greatest strengths as an artist, with two notable exceptions: sketches rendered in crayon and chalk respectively of a young girl, approximately 11 or 12 years old. Both drawings served as preliminary studies for his 1849 oil painting "A Shepherdess" (not included in this exhibition). This child peers out coyly from beneath her bonnet with genuine character and personality, reminiscent of female figures immortalized two centuries earlier in works by Johannes Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch.
However, throughout the rest of Millet's work, his subjects - people he quite likely knew personally from the Barbizon community - possess faces that appear hazy, indistinct, or even almost completely blank and featureless. The exhibition notes attribute this artistic choice to Millet's working method: unlike the Impressionist painters who would follow later, he did not paint his works en plein air (outdoors in natural light). Instead, he would make only a few small preliminary sketches while observing his subjects, then rely entirely on memory when creating the finished paintings back in his studio.
An alternative interpretation suggests that Millet deliberately chose to obscure individual features to illustrate a harsh truth about this environment: in such a world, individual identity and personality simply do not matter. This concept becomes particularly evident in the exhibition's final painting, "The Faggot Gatherers" (1868-75), which stands apart from the others both chronologically and stylistically, having been painted later with a distinctly more modern artistic sensibility.
Although "The Faggot Gatherers" was left unfinished at the time of Millet's death, one must wonder how much additional detail the artist ever intended to include. The bundles of sticks carried on the women's backs are rendered in meticulous, precise detail, as is the rough, weathered terrain stretching behind them. However, their faces remain nothing more than simple pink orbs, with only the tiniest dash of paint indicating an eye on the woman positioned nearest to the front of the composition. Through this artistic choice, Millet seems to suggest that for people living such an existence, all individual personality must be completely sublimated and suppressed - only their labor has any significance or value.
This intimate exhibition comprises just nine paintings and six sketches, creating a focused viewing experience. There can be something deeply satisfying about visiting a gallery specifically to examine a carefully selected handful of works with close attention, rather than attempting to absorb an overwhelming abundance of art. For visitors whose appetite for related art remains unsatisfied after viewing Millet's works, a 15-minute walk leads to the nearby Royal Academy of Arts, which currently hosts an exhibition featuring paintings by Vincent van Gogh - some directly inspired by Millet's work - alongside pieces by contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer, who drew inspiration from van Gogh's techniques and themes.
Taken together, these two exhibitions, serendipitously running simultaneously in London, serve as a powerful reminder of art's cyclical nature and the continuous flow of artistic influence. Ideas, techniques, and themes emerge, evolve, and return again and again across generations of artists, much like the changing seasons whose repetitive milestones and predictable routines would have provided the only reliable structure in the lives of Millet's hardworking peasants.
