Jean-François Millet

Realist painter Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) elevated peasant life to monumental dignity as a founder of the Barbizon school. Born to a farming family in Normandy, he trained in Cherbourg before studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Paul Delaroche. In 1849, fleeing a cholera epidemic, he settled in the village of Barbizon near the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he would spend the rest of his life painting the rural laborers he knew intimately.

The Gleaners (1857) depicts three women gathering leftover grain after harvest, a subject that troubled wealthy critics who saw dangerous social commentary in its sympathetic portrayal of the rural poor. The Angelus (1857-59) shows peasants pausing to pray at the sound of church bells, a scene his grandmother had enacted during his childhood. These paintings influenced Van Gogh, who made numerous copies, and Salvador Dalí, who obsessed over The Angelus. Today both masterworks hang at the Musée d'Orsay. The Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston also hold significant paintings.