Jean-François Millet
Jean -François Millet ( born October 4, 1814 Gruchy, Normandy, † January 20, 1875 in Barbizon ) was a French painter of realism. Besides Camille Corot, he is one of the leading artists of the Barbizon School.
Life and work
Millet was born the son of a wealthy farmer, Jean -Louis Nicolas Millet and his wife Aimée Henriette Adélaïde Henry. He received education by the Abbot Herpent. With the approval and support of parents, he took in Cherbourg in the artists Alfred Mouchel and Jean -Charles Langlois his first artistic studies. The community of Cherbourg awarded him a scholarship that enabled him to continue his studies at the École des Beaux -Arts in Paris under Paul Delaroche. In the Louvre he studied the Old Masters, Andrea Mantegna, Giorgione, Michelangelo and Nicolas Poussin and made drawings after her role model to.
In 1837 he created his first oil paintings. In 1840 he was represented for the first time with a picture at the Paris Salon. In 1841, he married Pauline - Virginie Ono, who died in April 21, 1844.
Between 1841 and 1847 he produced, oscillating between Paris and Cherbourg, portraits of family members and personalities from Cherbourg as well as paintings with mythological scenes. Although his portraits of those years show a fine, sensitive use of colors and light, he lived in difficult economic circumstances. Especially his mythological, stylistically leaning against the Rococo scenes encountered by the audience in a mocking criticism. However, his image Oedipus of 1847 was the interest and approval of the approved critic Théophile Thoré; this compared Millet with the Spanish painters and the brothers Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain.
However, this image was the last of that creative phase. Millet began now to turn to the peasant world of work. In the revolutionary year of 1848, his painting Le Vanneur solved ( the grain shaker) created a sensation at the Paris Salon from: Republican -minded art lovers took it on with enthusiastic approval, civic groups react with disgust. The Republican minister Ledru Rollin acquired the image.
Because of the great cholera epidemic of 1830, Millet 1849 moved with his family in the south of Paris, on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau village of Barbizon. From the 1850s he was living in economically secure circumstances by selling his paintings. His realistic images of the hard peasant labor world, such as Les Glaneuses ( The Gleaners ) of 1857, he carried a reputation as a revolutionary in some. He himself protested against this designation.
With his work man with the hoe, he dealt in 1860-1862 again with the farm work. He painted this picture for a salon in 1863.
From 1863 he turned, influenced among other things by his close friend Théodore Rousseau, to landscape painting. Pictures of the 1868-1873 resulting Printemps (Spring) already take stylistic elements of Impressionism. 1867 was shown a large collection of his works at the World Exhibition in Paris. In 1868 he was awarded the Order of Knight of the Legion of Honour.
In his later years, as from 1865, Millet made a whole series of pastel drawings. His late landscape paintings and drawings with her mystic light move him near the symbolism. In 1874 he is awarded the contract for coloring a chapel in the Pantheon. However, he did not get to finish this work.
François Millet died by weeks of nagging cough and migraine attacks invalidated, in January 1875 at the age of 60 years in Barbizon and was buried in the cemetery of Chailly -en- Bière, where Théodore Rousseau rests.
Millet's paintings were and are sometimes very popular, Les Glaneuses ( The Gleaners ), for example, was often reproduced as an art print and sold as cheap wall decorations.