Jean Francois Millet is a French painter. Brief biography of Jean-Francois Millet Jean Millet direction in painting

Although his works are of extreme importance in art for all artistic movements. He painted genre compositions, landscapes, created several portraits. Millet's painting "The Sower" inspired Van Gogh to create his compositions on a similar theme. And his "Angelus" was a favorite painting, a bright representative of surrealism. Then he turned to the images of "Angelus" all his life.

1. Biography. Childhood

Born in the village of Gryushi, near the city of Cherbourg, it is on the banks of the English Channel. He learned to read and write at the school at the village church. Like all peasant children, he helped his family a lot in the field. Later he writes: "The nature of this region left an indelible impression in my soul, because it retained such an original creation that I sometimes felt like a contemporary of Brueghel (meaning Pieter Brueghel the Old, an outstanding artist from the Netherlands of the 16th century) ​".

2. Study in Cherbourg

Noticing the talent in the child, the parents did everything possible to get their son out of the village. He was sent to Cherbourg, where he was placed in the studio of the painter Moschel, a local portrait painter. François's success led him to another studio to the artist Langlois. He believed so much in the student who received a scholarship for him from the Municipality of Cherbourg and the right to study in Paris. So the former redneck moved to the capital.

Once upon a time, his grandmother bequeathed him not to draw anything shameful, even when it was asked by the king himself. The grandson fulfilled the grandmother's will - and did a lot of useful things for the art of France, and indeed the whole world.

3. Portraits by Francois Millet

He is a portraitist by profession. He took and painted portraits. But he felt unhappy. In addition, in Paris, he studied with the historical painter Delaroche. He did not feel pleasure either from Delaroche or from Paris of that time. And so, because Paris is a desert for the poor. He rested his soul in the Louvre Museum, because it was necessary to gain experience that no one could give him, except for the old masters of art.

Polina Ono is the artist's wife. They got married in . Four years later, Polina will die of consumption (tuberculosis). Not everything was in order with the paintings - no one bought them. The artist lived on money from commissioned portraits.

4. Barbizon village

We didn't go there for inspiration. It was just cheap to live there and it's not far from Paris. The village is located in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Millais recalled that the peasant worked the land in Barbizon, like his father, and painted pictures in rare free hours. They are slowly being sold. And even the Minister of the Interior bought one of the prices, ten times the price of the artist.

But the number of outstanding landscape painters here was so great that the village became famous all over the world. Painted landscapes and Millet. And he felt that he was becoming a master, unlike anyone else. And in art this, after abilities and efficiency, is the main thing.

Among foreign artists, Millet was friends with the English virtuoso Frederick Leighton, remaining in no way like him.

5. Landscapes of Millais

6. Rural France in the 19th century

7. Gatherers of brushwood. Little masterpiece

It is almost impossible to find large paintings in Mille: the length of the famous canvas "Angelus" - 66 cm, "gatherers" - 111 cm, "Rest in the harvest" - 116 cm. And these, it seems, are the most.

The “collector of brushwood”, only 37 by 45 cm, became a small masterpiece. No one has painted French women like that yet. Two figurines are trying to extract dry wood stuck. The work worthy of doing to cattle is done by two peasant women themselves, without waiting for help. This is that terrible world where you simply can’t wait for help.

The researchers were surprised - there is neither a spectacular composition nor bright colors. Nobody gets killed and nobody screams. And the audience grabbed at the heart. Millet turned the face of bourgeois society to the people, to the excessive labor of the peasants, to sympathy for those who worked hard and terribly on the land. He converted society (and the art of France) to humanism. And this covered both the small size of Millet's paintings and the absence of coloristic treasures, theatrical gestures, screams, etc. The bitter truth of today was returning to art.

His call is heard. Milla became an authority on painting. And as always, some shouted about his politicization, others saw in him an exclusivity, a phenomenon. His paintings began to buy well.

Once upon a time, Tretyakov acquired "faggots" . No, not Pavel, he bought and supported Russian artists, and then presented Moscow with a gallery that bears his name. Acquired by Pavel's brother - Sergei Tretyakov, collected works by European artists. He usually sent money to his agent in Paris, and he, having seen worthy things at his own discretion, bought and sent them to Moscow. Both the discretion and the purchase proved to be very successful. In Moscow, this is almost the only (except for one more landscape) plot painting by Millet. But it's a masterpiece.

8. Two recognized masterpieces: "Angelus" and "collector of ears"

9. Etchings by Millet

Millet is one of the masters who turned to the creation of engravings. This was not the main thing in his work, so he made several experiments in different techniques: six lithographs, two heliographs, six woodcuts. In total he worked in the technique of etching. Among them there are both repetitions of his paintings (etching "the harvester of ears"), and quite independent plots. The etching "Death Takes a Peasant Woodcutter" was extremely successful, which recalled the masterpiece of the German master of the 16th century Hans Holbein from the series "Dance of Death" with high artistic quality.

Millet searched for a composition for a long time. The Louvre Museum retains two drawings by Francois Millet with the first search for composition. Another drawing came to the Hermitage in 1929. The composition of the latter formed the basis of both an etching and a painting on the same theme (New Carlsberg Glypkoteka, Copenhagen).

10. Countries where Millet's works are kept

Sources

• Dario Durb?, Anna M. Damigella: Corot und die Schule von Barbizon. Pawlak, Herrsching 1988, ISBN 3-88199-430-0
• Andr? Ferigier: Jean-François Millet. Die Entdeckung des 19. Jahrhunderts. Skira-Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-88447-047-7
• Ingrid Hessler: Jean-François Millet. Landschaftsdarstellung als Medium individueller Religiosit?t. Dissertation, Universität München 1983
• Estelle M. Hurll: Jean Francois Millet. A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the Painter, with Introduction and Interpretation, New Bedford, MA, 1900. ISBN 1-4142-4081-3
• Lucien Lepoittevin: Jean Fran?ois Millet - Au-del? de l "Ang?lus. Editions de Monza. Paris 2002, ISBN 978-2-908071-93-1
• Lucien Lepoittevin: Jean François Millet - Images et Symboles.?ditions ISO?TE Cherbourg 1990, ISBN 2-905385-32-4
• Alexandra R. Murphy (Hrsg.): Jean-François Millet, drawn into the light. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. 1999, ISBN 0-87846-237-6
• Alfred Sensier: La vie et l "?uvre de Jean-Fran?ois Millet. Editions des Champs, Bricqueboscq 2005, ISBN 2-910138-17-8 (neue Auflage des Werks von 1881)
• Andrea Meyer: Deutschland and Millet. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin und Mönchen 2009. ISBN 978-3-422-06855-1
• One hundred etchings of the 16th-19th centuries from the collection of the State Hermitage.L-M, 1964 (rus)
• The Pushkin Museum, art gallery catalog, M, Visual Arts, 1986 (rus)

Millet, along with Courbet, was one of the founders of mid-19th-century realism in France.

Jean-Francois Millet was born on October 4, 1814 in the village of Grouchy, in Normandy. He grew up in a patriarchal peasant family and from childhood he himself knew peasant labor. Since 1833, Millet has been studying with the artist Muschel in Cherbourg. The young artist's studies were interrupted by the death of his father in 1835. Millet had to return to the village, become the head of the family and begin to be a peasant again. However, relatives insisted on continuing classes. Millet's second teacher was Langlois, a student of Gros, also a Cherbourg artist. Langlois procured Millet a subsidy from the city, and at the beginning of 1837 Francois went to Paris.

Millais enters the workshop of Delaroche, participates in the competition for the Prix de Rome, but does not receive it. Then he studies at the Academy of Suiz. After some time, he returns to his homeland, and then again comes to Paris.

Millet did not immediately find his way into art. Initially, he paints paintings in the spirit of Boucher for sale and even appears with them at the Salon of 1844. However, at the same time we meet serious, expressive portraits in him. Creativity Millet finally takes shape by 1848 under the influence of emancipatory ideas that swept a wide range of artists and critics. In 1848, Millet exhibited The Winnower, and in 1849 he settled in the forest of Fontainebleau, in the village of Barbizon, where he lived all the time until his death (1875), occasionally leaving for his homeland. Peasant themes are firmly embedded in Millet's work, starting with the Salons of 1850-1851, where his Sower and Sheaf Binders appeared (Paris, Louvre). Millais knew peasant life well. He did not idealize the peasants, but he managed to express greatness in their simple, thoughtful poses, solemnity in their calm, mean gestures; he managed to elevate the most prosaic work. In the late 1840s and early 1950s, he created generalized images of lonely peasant women, full of sadness and thoughtfulness: Seamstress (1853, Paris, Louvre), Seated Peasant Woman (1849, Boston, Museum), Woman with a Cow » (Bourg-en-bres, Museum).

The trend towards monumental forms is particularly palpable in a life-size painting such as Sheep Shearing (1860).

Millet's contemporaries felt his yaga for a sublime, heroic style. Not without reason Theophile Gauthier in 1855 spoke about Millet's closeness to antiquity, about the melancholic memory of Virgil trembling under dark paint.

Millet also painted landscapes, but they are almost always associated with the life of peasants, nature in Millet's works is most often as joyless as the work of a peasant who earns his bread "by the sweat of his brow."

Optimistic notes are heard more often in his later works, where more attention is paid to lighting. The mouth is evidenced by such works as The Young Shepherdess (1872, Boston, Museum) or Harvesting Buckwheat (1869-1874, ibid.).

Millais was not a writer, he had difficulty expressing his thoughts, he was not a theoretician either. His letters and notes to some extent only summarize his creative experience, but they help us understand his own attitude to the real world, to man, to nature, to understand what tasks he set for himself in art. His statements, like all his work, are aimed at fighting against academic conventions. He opposes imitation, calls to focus on his observations, his impressions of nature. But Millet is far from slavishly following nature, he demands individual perception and individual embodiment from the artist, defends his right to generalize and comprehend the real world. The artist must show his attitude to the depicted. However, he contradicts himself in one thing: objectively, his works always had a certain social meaning, and it was not for nothing that he placed himself next to Courbet. But at the same time, he protested when he was considered a socialist or called an artist, more dangerous than Courbet, and he refused to take part in the federation of artists during the Paris Commune.

Coming from the people, Jean-Francois Millet is rightfully considered the largest representative of a truly folk genre in the art of France in the 19th century.

The artist was born on the English Channel near Greville, in the Norman village of Gruchy, into a wealthy peasant family. Since childhood, attached to rural labor, Jean-Francois was able to study painting only from the age of eighteen in the nearby city of Cherbourg with Mouchel, a student of David, and then with Langlois de Chevreil, a student of Gros.

In 1837, thanks to a modest scholarship awarded by the municipality of Cherbourg, Millet began his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with the then popular historical painter Delaroche. But academic Delaroche and Paris, with its hustle and bustle, equally constrain Millet, accustomed to the countryside. Only the Louvre seemed to him, by his own admission, a "saving island" in the middle of a city that seemed to a recent peasant "black, dirty, smoked." “Rescued” by the beloved works of Mantegna, Michelangelo and Poussin, in front of which he felt “like in his own family”, while only Delacroix was attracted from contemporary artists.

In the early 40s, Millet was helped to find his own face by a few close people, performed in a modest restrained scale, which laid the foundation for his in-depth comprehension of peasant looks and characters.

In the second half of the 1940s, Millet was inspired by communication with Daumier and the Barbizons, especially with Theodore Rousseau. But the main frontier for the artist's work was the revolution of 1848 - the same year when his painting “The Winnower” was exhibited at the Salon, perceived as a creative declaration.

In the summer of 1849, Millet left Paris forever for the sake of Barbizon and here, surrounded by a large family, he began to cultivate the land in the literal and figurative sense: in the morning he worked in the field, and in the afternoon he painted pictures from the life of farmers in the workshop, where scattered peasant things coexist with casts of masterpieces Parthenon. “The hero from the plowman” (Rolland), he was a recognized erudite in everything that concerned epic bucolic poetry, starting with Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, a lover of Hugo and Shakespeare, as well as the philosophy of Montaigne and Pascal. But Millet is looking for his “Homeric” heroes in everyday life, distinguishing “true humanity” in the most inconspicuous of the workers. “With the risk of being branded as a socialist,” he takes on the unpopular and little explored by painters, the acute social theme of labor. Indifferent to details, the painter usually paints his subjects from memory, making a strict selection and bringing together all the heterogeneity of living observations. Through expressive, almost sculptural chiaroscuro, sculpting the figures of people in large undifferentiated masses, and the restrained power of muted color, he seeks to achieve a generalizing typification of heroes in the belief that it is the collective "type that is the deepest truth in art."

Millet's typification is wide-ranging - from the typical genuineness of the professional gesture of plowmen, sawyers, woodcutters to the expression of the highest poetry of labor. This is not just work, but a lot, fate, moreover, in its dramatic aspect - as an eternal overcoming and struggle - with circumstances, with, with the earth. Millet reveals the special greatness of overcoming in the measured rhythms of the peasant and derives from this a very special spirituality of a man of physical labor.

The master expressed it most fully in the painting “The Sower”, which amazed the visitors of the Salon of 1851. In the figure dominating the boundless expanse of fields, the generalization of the eternal martial arts and the connection of man with the earth is brought by the author to a lofty symbol. From now on, each painting by Millet is accepted as a social event.

Thus, The Gatherers caused an even greater critical storm at the Salon of 1857. In their stately slow pace, the bourgeois, not without reason, suspected a hidden threat to the usual 'foundations', although Millet's work is also familiar with pure tenderness, especially in female images. In The Auvergne Shepherdess, The Spinner, The Churning of Butter, he glorifies the humblest household chores, and in Feeding the Chicks and The First Steps he sings of the joys of motherhood, never descending to sentimentality. In `Grafting a Tree` (1855), Millet connects the theme of a child with an escape in a single hope for the future. The naturalness of his peasants and the nature around them, the purity of their life, Millet deliberately opposed the moral degradation of the upper classes of the Second Empire.

In a pair of tired peasants from "Angelus" (1859), Millet reveals to the townspeople the subtlety of the soul, the ineradicable need for beauty, hidden under the bark of habitual coarseness. But the formidable power of the gloomy “Man with a Hoe” is already something completely different, which frightened the criticism of the Salon of 1863 for a reason. In a figure no less monolithic than the “Sower”, growing anger is felt behind the boundless fatigue. "The Man with the Hoe" and "The Resting Grower" are the most tragic of Millet's heroes - images of the crushed, concentrating in themselves the motives of spontaneous social protest on the verge of an explosion.

Since the mid-60s, Millet has often painted landscapes in which he seeks to express the eternal unity of man with nature, invariably lovingly noting everywhere the touch, the trace of man - whether it be a harrow left in the furrow or freshly swept haystacks. Behind the outward clumsiness of the silhouette of the squat, as if rooted into the ground “Church in Pear”, patient meekness is seen through, akin to the heroes of “Angelus”, and in landscapes similar to “Gust of Wind”, the same indomitability of the elements that secretly accumulated in its rebels - winegrowers and diggers.

In the 70s, Millet stopped exhibiting at the Salon, nevertheless, his fame was growing. The hermit solitude of the master is increasingly disturbed by visitors - collectors and just admirers, even students from different European countries appear. Not in vain, when he passed away in 1875, the artist prophetically proclaimed: “My work has not yet been done. It's barely starting."

He brought the peasant theme out of the narrowness of local ethnography, got rid of falseness and gloss, replacing the sensitive with the heroic, and the narrative with the strict poetry of his generalizations. His diligent successors of realism and the authenticity of the characters were such artists as Bastien-Lepage and Lermitte, and the Belgian Constantin Meunier developed the poetry of labor in his own way.

Millet's landscapes had a direct influence on Pissarro's uninhibited simplicity and lyricism, but he received the most innovative response in Holland from Vincent van Gogh, who brought the rebellious spirit to the extreme sharpening in the inexhaustible theme of the single combat of man with the earth.

JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET

Art is not a walk, it is a struggle, it is a fight.

Jean Francois Millet

There are masters in the world of art who have the amazing ability to embody their love or hatred, commitment to their time or its denial in a surprisingly brightly outlined, unusually vividly perceived series of plastic images. These artists enchant us and take us captive immediately and forever, as soon as we begin to study their work, peer into their canvases, listen to the music of their paintings.

The mysterious world of Rembrandt. A ghostly light streams. Shadows flicker. A golden twilight reigns. We wander enchanted. Haman, Esther, Danae, the Prodigal Son are not the ghostly faces of distant legends and myths, living, living people, suffering, yearning, loving. In the darkness, precious stones, golden luxurious decorations shine, sparkle, and next to this vain splendor are the shabby rags of poor old men and old women, ancient and wise. The night watch walks towards us. Shining armor. The weapon rings. Rustling priceless lace. Silks flutter. But this is not what strikes us in the canvases of Rembrandt van Rijn. Man Himself, great and insignificant, tender and cruel, honest and treacherous, stands before us...

In a moment we are flying into the abyss. Goya. Furious, furious instantly seizes our soul. Black night sky. Next to us, witches and ghouls rush and somersault with laughter and squeals - visions created by the author of "Caprichos". Spain. Bulls roar. Wounded horses scream. Seductive eyes sparkle. Degenerate kings and princes smile smugly. Gun salvos rumble, and the best sons of Spain fall to the ground. And all this is Goya! Only Goya!

We slowly walk past the sweetly snoring, fat gluttons by Pieter Brueghel and see the distant, promised and wondrous Land of lazy people. And suddenly we shudder when a string of ominous and wretched blind men passes by us with cries and groans, rattling with sticks, hobbling, stumbling and falling, reminding us of the frailty of the world. A minute later, red-nosed revelers surround us and pick them up under the arms. We whirl in a whirlwind of dance and dance until we drop on the square of a village unfamiliar to us. We are terrified, and we feel the chilling breath of Death. This is Brueghel. Pieter Bruegel - sorcerer and sorcerer.

Endless plowed field. Morning. Hear the sound of silence. We feel the infinity of earth and sky. Before us grows a young giant. He walks unhurriedly, widely scattering golden grains of wheat. The earth breathes serenely, wet with dew. This is the world of Jean-Francois Millet... We are trying to catch up with the Sower, but he goes ahead. We hear the measured beat of his mighty heart. A moment - and we wander through the shady, cool forest. We listen to the conversation of the trees. The cod of brushwood, the clatter of wooden clogs. And again we are in the field. Golden stubble. Dusty haze. Heat. High in the zenith the lark sings. Stacks, stacks. Harvest. We suffocate from the heat, we sweat, collecting spikelets together with harsh peasant women, bronzed from sunburn. Millais! It was he who sang the hard and unbearable peasant labor. It was he who generously and forever left all the music of morning and evening dawns, the multicolored rainbows, the freshness of flowering. All the unusualness of the ordinary.

Rembrandt, Brueghel, Goya, Millet. Artists are infinitely different. But the art of each of them, as, indeed, of many other great masters, entered our souls. And, often observing the phenomena of today's life, we immediately recall their canvases and mentally exclaim: just like in a painting by Leonardo or Rembrandt, Surikov or Millet! These wonderful worlds, born in the crucible of human passions, have entered into our flesh and blood to such an extent. After all, the painters who created these images were just people with all their worries and joys. Years, sometimes centuries, have passed since the birth of their canvases. But they live. True, hardly anyone will see with their own eyes the flight of Goy's witches or the fantastic faces of Brueghel's insights. A long time ago, the world created by Leonardo, Surikov or Millet left us.

Pieter Brueghel. Peasant dance.

But we are convinced, deeply convinced of the artistic truth of their paintings. The faith of these masters in the greatness of the human spirit, in the Man is transmitted to us, and we are learning to understand our today's complex, complex, complex world ...

Let's turn to one of these wonderful masters - Jean-Francois Millet. An artist sincere, pure, honest. His life was a feat.

Not everyone imagines the true destiny of many outstanding French painters of the last century. We are sometimes possessed by certain lightened ideas about their almost rosy fate. Perhaps the sonorous, festive, joyful words - attic, Montmartre, Barbizon, plein air - obscure from us the undisguised poverty, hunger, despair, loneliness that such excellent masters of the 19th century experienced as Rousseau, Millet, Troyon, Dean, Monet, Sisley. But the closer we get acquainted with their biographies, the more menacingly, severely the tragic struggle of each of these masters appears. With non-recognition, adversity, with blasphemy and reproach. After all, only a few, and then too late, have achieved fame. But back to Milla.

It all started out pretty banal. On one of the January days of 1837, the stagecoach, rumbling over the cobblestones, drove into Paris, black from soot and soot. Then there was no fashionable term “smog”, there was no intoxication from thousands of cars, but dirty, gray, piercing fog, saturated with stench, roar, noise, hustle stunned the young peasant guy, accustomed to the clean, transparent air of Normandy and silence. Jean-Francois Millet stepped into the land of this "new Babylon". He was twenty-two years old. He is full of hope, strength and ... doubts. Millais joined the thousands of provincials who came here to win a place under the sun. But Jean Francois is not at all like the daring heroes of the novels of Honore de Balzac, who saw Paris at their feet in advance. The young artist was extremely shy. His spiritual world was blown up by the spectacle of the city at night. Dim orange light of street lamps. Shifting purple shadows on slippery sidewalks. A grey, soul-piercing dank fog. Boiling lava of people, carriages, horses. Narrow gorges of streets. Unfamiliar stuffy smells oppressed the breath of a resident of the English Channel, brought up on the seashore. Jean-François recalled with a sort of desperate sharpness the little village of Gryushi, his home, the wild beauty of the surf, the buzzing of the spinning wheel, the singing of the cricket, the wise admonitions of his beloved grandmother Louise Jumelain. Sobs rose to his throat, and the future artist burst into tears right on the Parisian pavement.

“I tried to overcome my feelings,” Millet said, “but I couldn’t, it was beyond my strength. I managed to hold back my tears only after I scooped up water from a street fountain with my hands and poured it over my face.

The young man began to look for a lodging for the night. The evening city grumbled dully. The last scarlet rays of dawn painted the chimneys of the dark bulks of houses. Fog took over Paris. Saturday. Everyone rushed somewhere headlong. Millais was timid beyond measure. He hesitated to ask the address of the hotel and wandered around until midnight. One can imagine how much "genre" he could see on the Saturday panels. He had an amazingly sharp, all-remembering eye. He was handsome, that Jean Francois. Tall, bearded, strong, with the neck of a bull and the shoulders of a porter from Cherbourg. But he had only one feature that was difficult for life - a tender, easily wounded soul, sensitive, pure. Otherwise, he probably would not have become the great Millet that France is proud of today. We emphasize the word today, for he will spend most of his life in obscurity. And now Jean wanders around Paris at night. Finally he found furnished rooms. Millais later recalled:

“All that first night I was haunted by some kind of nightmares. My room turned out to be a stinking hole where the sun did not penetrate. As soon as dawn broke, I jumped out of my lair and rushed into the air.

The fog cleared. The city, as if washed, shone in the rays of dawn. The streets were still empty. Lone fiacre. Wipers. Silence. In the frosty sky - a cloud of crows. Jean went to the embankment. A crimson sun hung over the twin towers of Notre Dame. The island of Cité, like a sharp-breasted ship, sailed on the heavy, leaden waves of the Seine. Suddenly Jean-Francois shuddered. A bearded man was sleeping on a bench next to him. The scarlet rays of the sun touched the tired, pale, haggard face, slipped over the shabby dress, broken shoes. Millet stopped. Some painful, hitherto unknown feeling seized him. He had seen tramps before, beggars, degraded, dirty and drunk. It was something else. Here, in the heart of Paris, next to the Notre Dame Cathedral, this humiliation of a Man, still young, full of strength, but somehow not pleasing to the City, seemed especially cruel ... The thought instantly flashed: "But it could be me too." Passing under the dark arches of the bridge, Jean-Francois saw several more unfortunate men and women sleeping side by side. He finally realized that Paris is not always a holiday. If only he knew that ten years after hard study, hard work and notable success in art, he would still be on the verge of the same hopeless need, disorder, collapse of all hopes! All this was hidden from the beginning artist. But the meeting left a heavy aftertaste.

“So I met Paris,” Millet later recalled. “I didn’t curse him, but I was horrified because I didn’t understand anything either in his worldly or in his spiritual being.”

Paris. The first worries, and worries, and sadness came. Yes, the sadness that did not leave him for a single day, even in the happiest moments.

“Enough! the reader will exclaim. “Yes, young Millet, obviously, was a complete melancholic and misanthrope!”

The fact is that the young man, brought up in a puritanical spirit, in a patriarchal peasant family, could not accept the Parisian way of life.

In those days, people still little used the word "incompatibility", science has not yet determined the important place of this concept in biology, in medicine, in human life.

Obviously, the young Millet gave us one of the clearest examples of this very incompatibility.

He still has a lot to go through and suffer in Paris. It cannot be said that he did not have light moments at all. But they were appallingly few.

"I don't curse Paris." In these words, the whole Millet. Noble, open, devoid of bitterness or revenge. He will live in this city for twelve years. He went through a great school of life here ...

He studied painting with the chic, but empty Delaroche, the king of the Salons, who spoke about Millet:

“You are not like everyone else, you are not like anyone else.”

But noting the originality and firm will of the student, Delaroche added that the recalcitrant Millet needed an "iron stick."

Peasant women with brushwood.

Here is hidden another of the main character traits of a novice painter - an unbending will, which perfectly coexisted in his soul with tenderness and kindness.

From the earliest steps in art, Millet did not accept lies, theatricality, sugary salonism. He said:

"Buchet is just a celadon."

The artist wrote about Watteau, ironically over the affectation of the characters of his canvases, all these marquises, thin-legged and slender, drawn into tight corsets, bloodless from holidays and balls:

“They remind me of dolls, whitewashed and rouged. And as soon as the performance is over, all these brethren will be thrown into a box, and there they will mourn their fate.

His muzhik inside did not accept exquisite theatricality. Jean Francois, as a young man, plowed the land, mowed, harvested bread. He knew, damn it, the price of life, he loved the earth and man! Therefore, he was not on the way with Delaroche, whose entire school was built on a purely external vision of the world. His students diligently copied, painted antique sculptures, but almost none of them knew life. Peers teased Jean Francois, considering him a redneck, but were afraid of his strength. Behind him strengthened the nickname of the Forest Man. The young painter worked hard and ... was silent.

But the crisis was brewing.

Millet decided to become independent. We would be wrong if we did not emphasize the riskiness of this step. A beggar student who does not have a stake or a court in Paris, and the luminary of the Salon, the minion of the Parisian bourgeois, sung by the press "the great Delaroche."

It was a riot!

But Millet felt the strength and correctness of his convictions. He leaves the workshop of Delaroche. The teacher is trying to get the student back. But Millet is adamant. It was a continuation of the very incompatibility that, as you know, rejects a transplanted alien heart from the body. Millet a Norman could never become Millet a Parisian. The young artist valued personal freedom and the truth of art most of all. Here is his life motto:

“No one will make me bow! He won't force you to write for the sake of Parisian living rooms. I was born a peasant, and I will die a peasant. I will always stand on my native land and will not retreat a single step. And Millet did not retreat either before Delaroche, or before the Salon, or before hunger and niches, this. But what did it cost him! Here is a scene from the life of Millet, which will tell us a lot.

Attic. Frost on a broken window sealed with strips of paper. A rusty, long-extinguished stove. In front of her is a pile of ash on an iron sheet. Gray frost on antique plaster torsos, on piled heaps of stretchers, canvases, on cardboards and an easel. Millet himself sits on a large chest containing sketches and sketches. Big, stocky. He has changed a lot since his arrival in Paris. Facial features sharpened. The eyes sunk deep. The first strands of silver appeared in the thick beard. Eleven years of life in Paris is not a trifle. Especially if you have your own austere path in art, if you don't hang around the thresholds of bourgeois living rooms, you don't act.

…It was getting dark fast. The oil in the lamp ran out. The charred wick only smoldered, flashing brightly from time to time, and then awkward crimson shadows wandered along the damp walls of the studio. At last the light of the lamp flickered for the last time. Blue twilight broke into the attic. It got quite dark. The figure of the artist, hunched over from the cold, was drawn in a black silhouette against the background of glass painted with frost. Silence. Only on the ceiling of the atelier ran blue, purple mischievous glare - the lights of Paris, "the most cheerful city in the world." Somewhere outside the walls of the studio, the well-fed, luxurious life of the bourgeois capital was seething, seething, restaurants were sparkling, orchestras were thundering, carriages were rushing. All this was so far away and, however, so close ... Almost close. But only not for artists who are looking for their language of truth, not catering to their tastes of the Salon. A sudden creak broke the mournful silence.

Come in,” Millais almost whispered.

A beam of light entered the workshop. On the threshold stood Sansier, the painter's friend. He brought a hundred francs - an allowance for the artist.

Thank you, Millet said. - It's very handy. We haven't eaten anything for two days. But it is good that although the children did not suffer, they had food all the time ... He called his wife. I'm going to buy firewood because I'm very cold.

It seems that it is inappropriate to comment on this scene, depicting the life of one of the great artists of France. That year, Millet was already thirty-four years old, he managed to create a number of excellent portraits, by the way, executed in the best traditions of French art. Among them is a wonderful canvas depicting Jean Francois's beloved grandmother Louise Jumelin, who did so much to develop the character of the future master. “Portrait of Pauline Virginie Ono”, the first wife of Millet, who died early, could not bear the hardships of life in Paris, is written subtly, lyrically. The hand of a great painter is felt in the coloring, composition, molding of the form. Oh, if Millais had chosen the path of a fashionable portrait painter! His family, he himself would never have known adversity. But the career of a fashion artist was not needed by the young Jean-Francois. He did not want to repeat the tragedy of Gogol's Chartkov, unknown to him. Millais was already on the verge of creating masterpieces. For this, another blow of fate was needed, another test.

And it has come.

… Millet had a family, children. I had to earn my daily bread somehow. And the young artist occasionally performed small orders for scenes from ancient myths. Jean Francois reluctantly wrote trinkets, thinking that all these pictures will sink into oblivion and it will be possible to forget about them ... But nothing in life goes unnoticed!

One fine spring day, Millais wandered around Paris. He did not feel the beauty of spring. Thoughts about life's failures, lack of money, and most importantly, about the waste of time on petty earnings were relentless. The longing intensified, the longing for Normandy, for the open fields, for the high sky of the motherland. He saw the house, mother, grandmother, relatives. He grieved. March painted the landscape of the city in bright, jubilant colors. The azure sky turned into turquoise puddles, along which pink, lilac clouds floated. A trembling transparent haze rose from the heated stones of the pavement. Spring was gathering momentum. Suddenly, Jean-Francois stopped at a bookstore, in the window of which colorful lithographs, leaf reproductions from paintings were hung, books were laid out. Near the display case, two older men were giggling, looking at frivolous scenes from mythology, where frisky young goddesses had fun with muscular, well-built young gods. Millais came closer and saw his painting among the reproductions. She seemed to him terribly sugary. And to top it all, I heard: "This is Millet, he does not write anything other than this." The son of a peasant, a native of Normandy, a craftsman who deeply in his heart despised this genre of leaf, he, Jean-Francois Millet, who devoted all the heat of his heart to the peasant theme, was killed! Insulted, humiliated, he did not remember how he got home.

As you wish, - said Millet to his wife, - and I will no longer deal with this daub. True, it will be even more difficult for us to live, and you will have to suffer, but I will be free to do what my soul has been yearning for for a long time.

His faithful wife Catherine Lemaire, who shared with him a long life, joys, hardships and hardships, answered briefly:

I'm ready!

Do what you like…

In the life of every true artist there comes a moment when he must cross a certain invisible threshold separating him, a young man full of illusions, hopes, lofty aspirations, but who has not yet spoken his word in art, who has not yet created anything cardinal, from the moment when before he faces the task in all its immensity - to find and give people a new beauty, not yet discovered by anyone, still unknown, not expressed by anyone.

At that moment, when Millet decided to starve, but not to dishonor his brush, exchanging for salon academic crafts, the very “Dante of the hillbilly”, “Michelangelo of the peasant”, whom the whole world knows today, was born.

How important it is at the hour of making a decision to have a person nearby who is ready to go with you on a feat. How many talents, talents, weaker in character, found their doom in the love of their dear spouses for gold trinkets, furs and all those infinitely caressing vanity trifles that are included in the banal concept of "social life"!

Millais was not alone. In addition to his faithful, devoted and intelligent wife - the daughter of a simple worker from Cherbourg - his advisers, great artists of the past, were always next to him. In the most bitter, it seemed, hopeless moments of life in Paris, there was a house in which Millet always found good advice and could rest his heart and soul. It was the Louvre. Starting from the very first days of his stay in Paris, the brightest hours in the life of young Jean Francois were communication with the great masters of the past, with their art.

“It seemed to me,” Millet said of the Louvre, “that I was in a long-familiar country, in my own family, where everything I looked at appeared before me as the reality of my visions.”

The young artist deeply felt the great simplicity and plasticity of the Italian artists of the 15th century. But most of all, the young painter was shocked by Mantegna, who possessed an unsurpassed power of the brush and a tragic temperament. Jean Francois said that painters like Mantegna had incomparable power. They seem to throw armfuls of joy and sorrow into our faces, with which they are filled. “There were moments when, looking at the martyrs of Mantegna, I felt the arrows of St. Sebastian pierce my body. Such masters have magical powers."

But, of course, the true deity for the young master was the giant of the High Renaissance, Michelangelo. Here are the words that reflect all his love, all admiration for the genius of Buonarroti:

“When I saw a drawing by Michelangelo,” he said, “depicting a man in a swoon, the outline of these relaxed muscles, the depressions and reliefs of this face, dead from bodily suffering, caused me a strange sensation. I myself experienced his suffering. I took pity on him. I suffered in his body and felt pain in his members ... I realized, Millet continued, - that the one who created this is able to embody all the good and all the evil of mankind in a single figure. It was Michelangelo. To call this name means to say everything. Long ago, back in Cherbourg, I saw some of his weak engravings, but now I heard the heartbeat and the voice of this man, whose irresistible power over me I felt all my life.

Maybe someone will find such “neurasthenicity” strange, such an extraordinary sensitivity in a guy who had flourishing health and extraordinary strength, a man with the mighty hands of a plowman and the soul of a child. But, perhaps, in this very hypersensitivity there was that psychological impulse that gave rise to the phenomenon, whose name is Jean-Francois Millet.

This does not mean that the young master was inherent in at least an iota of any infantilism. Hear what he has to say about the process of making the painting and about the French painter Poussin:

“The picture must first be created in the mind. The artist cannot make her grow alive on the canvas right away - he carefully, one by one, removes the covers that hide her. But these are almost the words of Poussin: “In my mind I already saw her in front of me, and this is the main thing!”

Catching birds with a torch.

The influence on the process of maturation of the young talent of such outstanding masters of world art as Michelangelo, Mantegna, Poussin was enormous. Their invisible help accomplished a true miracle. A rural guy, a provincial who studied in the studio of the most banal Delaroche, having experienced the spell of Parisian academic and salon painting, nevertheless survived and found the strength to create paintings that eventually conquered both the Salon and its adherents - “yellow” journalists and newspaper men. From the first steps, Millet's art was characterized by a high sense of responsibility as an artist. Listen to his words:

“Beauty is not in what and how is depicted in the picture, but in the need felt by the artist to depict what he saw. This very necessity generates the strength needed to accomplish the task.

“Felt necessity” is that highest citizenship, that purity of spiritual impulse, honesty of the heart, which helped Millet to be true to the truth of art. Millais said more than once with a feeling of bitterness:

“Art with us is just decoration, decoration of living rooms, while in the old days, and even in the Middle Ages, it was the pillar of society, its conscience ...”

"The Conscience of Society". Everything could be said about the Paris Salon: magnificent, brilliant, dazzling, grandiose. But, alas, salon art had no conscience. This work was chic, sparkling, heartbreaking, if you like, even virtuoso, but the short word "truth" was not honored here.

The Paris Salon lied!

He spoke lies in huge, sazhen colossus with magnificent scenery, against which the heroes of myths gesticulated and recited - gods and goddesses, helmet-shining Roman emperors, lords of the Ancient East. Inflated muscles, spectacular draperies, camera angles, streams of fire and blood in endless bacchanalia and battles created by salon luminaries were fictitious, stilted, fake.

Seductive peisans depicted the happy citizens of France - a country of fun and joy. But well-fed and plump, jubilant peisans and peisans, playing simple genre scenes “from rural life”, were also at least a fairy tale - those lacquered canvases were so far from life. This art, lackey, empty and vulgar, filled the walls of the Salon. The air of the opening days was filled with the aroma of perfume, powder, incense, and incense.

And suddenly the fresh wind of the fields, the aroma of meadows, the strong smell of peasant sweat burst into the atmosphere of this incense. Millet appeared in the Salon. It was a scandal!

But before talking about the battles of Jean-Francois Millet with the Paris Salon, I want to figure out who needed such an accumulation of vulgarity and bad taste. Why was the Salon and its endlessly changing fashion lords needed - the lions of secular living rooms, the luminaries of vernissages. This question was best answered by the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

“Sovereigns are always pleased to look at the spread among their subjects of inclinations to the arts that deliver only pleasant entertainment ... In this way they educate their subjects in spiritual pettiness, so convenient for slavery.”

The painting of the Paris Salon, despite the large-format canvases and the roar of enchanting compositions, fully corresponded to the “education of pettiness in subjects”. No less contributed to this endless canvases with naked and half-naked nymphs, shepherdesses, goddesses and just bathers. The Parisian public of the Salon - petty bourgeois, philistines - was quite satisfied with such a masquerade, replacing life. And the audience cheered. Decency, splendor and a certain comme il faut reigned in the air of the Salon, but sometimes this atmosphere exploded with innovative artists - Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet ... Among the troublemakers was Jean Francois Millet.

Imagine for a moment the overdressed, perfumed, exhausted from crampedness and stuffiness, the audience of the Paris Salon of the second half of the last century. The huge halls of this "sanctuary of art" are filled to overflowing with dozens, hundreds of paintings. The groans of the first Christians, the clanging of swords of gladiators, the roar of the biblical flood, the sweet melodies of shepherd pastorals pour from the walls of the Salon. What kind of tricks of color, such puzzling angles, mysterious plots, the sweetest nudes was not equipped with the next opening day! What expanse of vulgarity, what a sea of ​​falseness and bad taste! And now, in the midst of all this golden-framed extravaganza, a small canvas appears before the satiated spectators.

Human. One. It stands in the middle of an endless field. He is tired. And for a moment leaned on a hoe. We hear his ragged breathing. The wind brings the crackle of burning fires to us, the bitter aroma of burning grass eats our eyes. A peasant in a coarse white shirt. Ripped, old pants. Sabo. Face dark with tan, scorched by the sun. The hollows of the eye sockets are like an antique mask. The open mouth gasps for air. The hands of overworked hands are heavy, with clumsy, knotted, like tree roots, fingers. The metal of the hoe shines in the sun, polished on the hard earth. The peasant peers into the elegant crowd surrounding him. He is silent. But his dumbness makes the question embedded in the steep eyebrows even more terrible.

"Why?" - ask invisible eyes, hidden by a shadow.

"Why?" - ask the hands mutilated by overwork.

"Why?" - ask the question of the lowered shoulders, the bent, sweat-covered back of a man hunched over ahead of time.

The free wind is buzzing, buzzing, walking around the wasteland overgrown with weeds and burdock. The sun beats mercilessly, exposing all the disorder, the loneliness of man. But neither the wind, nor the sun, nor the sky itself can answer why this far from old man should live in poverty from cradle to grave, working from dawn to dusk. And yet, despite all the hardships and troubles, he is powerful, he is great, this Man!

And he's scary. Terrified by his silence.

Imagine how the just amiable, cheerful, flushed faces of the beautiful spectators of the Salon and their cavaliers, shiny with well-being, were distorted by a grimace of surprise, horror, contempt.

The man is silent.

Man with a hoe.

Wanted or did not want Jean-Francois Millet, but in the dumb question embedded in a small canvas, all the pathos of exposing the injustice of the existing system. To do this, he did not need to fence a multi-planted colossus, populate it with dozens of extras, did not have to burn Bengal fires of idle talk. That is the strength of Millet, the strength of the plastic embodiment of the artistic image. The only, unique, devoid of any stiltedness. Because at the heart of every picture, large or small, there must be artistic truth. Something that marks the work of such different masters, such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Surikov, Courbet, Millet, Daumier, Manet, Vrubel, Van Gogh ... and of course Pieter Brueghel the Elder Peasant.

But isn't it time for us to return to Jean-Francois Millet himself, whom we left in Paris to make an important decision - "to quit daubing and start a new life"?

Millet's words did not differ from the deed. He had a masculine firm character and pure Norman stubbornness. In 1849, he and his family left Paris with all its brilliance, bustle, noise, which endlessly interfered with Jean Francois, did not allow him to paint the treasured canvases. He arrives in Barbizon, a remote village. Millet thought that he would settle here for the season - to paint, to pee.

But fate decided otherwise.

The artist lived here until his death in 1875, more than a quarter of a century. In Barbizon, he created his best canvases. And no matter how hard it was for him, there was land nearby, beloved, dear, there was nature, ordinary people, friends.

One of his closest art comrades was Theodore Rousseau, a wonderful French landscape painter. Here is an excerpt from a letter that Millet sent to Paris, to Rousseau, when he temporarily left Barbizon on business:

“I don’t know what your wonderful celebrations are in Notre Dame Cathedral and the city hall, but I prefer those modest festivities that greet me as soon as I leave the house, trees, rocks in the forest, black hordes of crows in the valley or what some dilapidated roof, over which the smoke from the chimney curls, spreading intricately in the air; and you will learn from it that the mistress cooks supper for the tired workers who are about to come home from the field; or a small star suddenly flashes through a cloud - we once admired such a star after a magnificent sunset - or someone’s silhouette appears in the distance, slowly rising up the mountain, but is it possible to enumerate everything that is dear to someone who does not think that the roar of an omnibus or a piercing the grinding of a street tinker are the best things in the world. Only you don’t confess to everyone in such tastes: after all, there are gentlemen who call it eccentricity and reward our brother with various nasty nicknames. I confess this to you only because I know that you suffer from the same ailment ... "

Is it necessary to add anything to this cry of the soul, in love with the quiet charm of immortal nature. Millet said more than once that there is nothing more pleasant than to lie down in the ferns and look at the clouds. But he especially loved the forest.

If only you could see how beautiful the forest is! he said. - I sometimes go there in the evening, when I finish the day's work, and each time I return home in dismay. What terrible peace and greatness! Sometimes I get really scared. I don’t know what these rakali-trees are whispering about, but they have some kind of conversation, and we just don’t understand them because we speak different languages, that’s all. I don't think they just talk like that.

But the painter did not see in the village, in the fields surrounding him, only an idyll, a kind of Eden. Here are some of his words, in which you clearly feel the birth of the plot of "The Man with the Hoe", already known to you from the Paris Salon of 1863.

“I see both dandelion corollas and the sun when it rises far, far away from here and the flame flares up among the clouds. But I also see horses in the field, smoking with sweat when they pull the plow, and on some stony patch, a man exhausted; he has been working since early morning; I hear him gasp and feel him straighten his back with an effort. This is a tragedy in the midst of splendor - and I did not invent anything here.

... Somewhere far away were Paris, Salon, enemies. It truly seemed that life could be started all over again. But it was not there. A large family demanded funds, but there were none. Painting was also an expensive occupation. Paints. Canvases. Models. It's all money, money, money. And again and again before Millais there was a relentless question: how to live? At the time of the creation of his best painting "The Collectors of Ears", in 1857, the artist was in despair, on the verge of suicide. Here are the lines from the letter, revealing the hopelessness of Millet's need.

“My heart is full of darkness,” he wrote. “And everything is black and black ahead, and this blackness is approaching ... It’s scary to think what will happen if I don’t manage to get money for the next month!”

The artist's feelings were aggravated by the fact that he could not see his beloved mother. There was no money to go to visit her. Here is a letter from a mother to her son, already a well-known artist, but, unfortunately, who did not have a few extra francs to visit Gryusha's native village.

“My poor child,” wrote the mother, “if only you would come before winter came! I am so yearned, I just think - if only to look at you one more time. It's all over for me now, only suffering is left to me and death ahead. My whole body hurts, and my soul is torn, as I think what will become of you, without any means! And I have no rest, no sleep. You say you really want to come and see me. And how I want it! Yes, it looks like you don't have any money. How do you live? My poor son, when I think about all this, my heart is just out of place. Oh, I still hope that, God willing, you will suddenly get ready and come, when I will completely stop waiting for you. And I can’t bear to live, and I don’t want to die, I so want to see you.

The mother died without ever seeing her son.

These are the pages of Millet's life in Barbizon. However, Jean Francois, despite all the hardships, grief, despair, wrote, wrote, wrote. It was in the years of the most severe hardships that he created his masterpieces. This is the response of the true creator to the blows of fate. Work, work despite all the troubles!

The first masterpiece created in Barbizon was The Sower. It was written in 1850.

... The Sower walks wide. The arable land is buzzing. He walks majestically, slowly. Every three steps, his right hand takes out a handful of wheat from the bag, and in an instant a golden scattering of grains flies up in front of him. Takes off and falls into the black wet soil. Epic power emanates from this small canvas. Human. One on one with the earth. Not a hero of an ancient myth - a simple man in a worn shirt, in broken clogs, strides, strides across a wide field. Crows are crying, flying over the edge of the arable land. Morning. In a gray haze on a slope - a team of oxen.

Spring. The sky is white and cold. Chilly. But the face of the digger shines. Sweat, hot sweat poured down like a copper-forged face. The primordial, ancient secret of the birth of a new life illuminates Millet's canvas. The harsh romance of everyday life permeates the picture.

A true hero of the history of the human race stepped towards the depraved, pampered spectator of the Paris Salon.

Not a biblical saint, not an Eastern ruler, not Caesar - His Majesty the People himself appeared on the canvas of Millet ...

The great silence of spring. The air rings from the awakening juices of the earth, swollen with dew. Almost tangibly you feel how the arable land breathes, awakened by the plow, ready to receive the life-giving seed. Wide, wide strides the Sower. He smiles, he sees tens, hundreds, thousands of his brothers walking beside him on this bright morning and bringing new life to the earth and people. He sees the sea, the sea of ​​loaves. The fruits of the labors of their hands.

A grenade exploded in Salon. Such was the resonance caused by this small canvas. Idle scribblers agreed to the point that they saw in a handful of grain in the hands of a sower "the threat of a commoner."

He, they say, does not throw grain, but ... buckshot.

You say - nonsense?

Maybe. So the scandal broke out.

"Beggarly style" called Millet's style of painting. The master himself, not without humor, said that when he sees his canvases next to the polished, varnished canvases of the Salon, “he feels like a man in dirty shoes who has fallen into the living room.”

Like Virgil, Millais unhurriedly unfolded the epic of rural life before the viewer. The school of Mantegna, Michelangelo, Poussin allowed him to create his own language, simple, monumental, extremely honest. The painter's love for nature, for the earth is the love of a son. Few of the artists of our planet in the entire history of this invisible umbilical cord that connects man with the earth.

It would be unfair to say that true connoisseurs of art did not notice The Sower. Here is what Théophile Gauthier wrote:

“A dark sackcloth clothes him (the sower), his head is covered with some strange cap; he is bony, thin and emaciated under this livery of poverty, and yet life comes from his broad hand, and with a magnificent gesture he, who has nothing, sows the bread of the future on the earth ... There is grandeur and style in this figure with a powerful gesture and proud posture, and it seems that he is written by the land that he sows.

Gatherers of ears.

But these were only the first signs of recognition. Before the big success was still very, very far away. Most importantly, "The Sower" did not leave any of the spectators indifferent, indifferent. There were only "for" or "against". And that meant a lot.

"Gatherers of Ears". 1857 One of Millet's most significant paintings. Perhaps the apotheosis of his work. This canvas was created in the years of the most difficult everyday trials.

August. Scorched stubble. The sun beats mercilessly. The wind, hot, smelling of dust, carries the chirping of grasshoppers, a deaf human voice. Ears. Our daily bread. The prickly stubble meets the hands of peasant women looking for ears of corn with stiff bristles. Famine, the coming winter drove these women here. Village goal. Poor. Bronze, dark sunburned faces. Burnt out clothes. All signs of hopeless need. "Certificate of poverty" - paper gives the right to collect spikelets, and this is considered a boon. At the edge of the field - huge stacks, carts, loaded to the limit with sheaves. The harvest is rich!

But all this abundance is not for these women, bent over in three deaths. Their lot is need. Gatherers of ears. After all, these are sisters, the wives of the mighty Sower. Yes, they collect an insignificant part of the abundant harvest that they have sown.

And again, whether Jean-Francois Millet wants or does not want, we are faced with the question in all its grandeur.

Why does all the abundance, all the wealth of the earth fall into the wrong hands? Why does a worker who has grown a crop drag out a beggarly existence? What about others? And again, whether the author wanted it or not, the citizenship of his canvas shakes the sacred foundations of contemporary society. Three women are silent, collecting spikelets. We don't see facial expressions. Their movements are extremely stingy, in which there is not one iota of protest, and even more so of rebellion.

And, however, an idle critic from the Le Figaro newspaper imagined something similar. He yelled from a newspaper page:

“Remove the little children! Here are the pickers from Mr. Millet. Behind these three pickers, on the gloomy horizon, the faces of popular uprisings and the scaffolds of 93 loom!

So the truth is sometimes worse than bullets and buckshot. Millet's paintings established a new beauty in the art of France in the 19th century. It was "the extraordinary of the ordinary." Truth.

And only the truth.

Life went on. Two years after the creation of The Gatherers, Millet, already a well-known artist, writes to one of his friends. The letter is dated 1859, the year the Angelus was founded.

“We have firewood left for two, three days, and we simply do not know what to do, how to get more. In a month, my wife will give birth, but I don’t have a penny ... "

"Angelus". One of the most popular paintings in the world of art. Millet himself talks about the origin of her plot in the following way: "Angelus" is a picture that I wrote, thinking about how once, working in the field and hearing the ringing of a bell, my grandmother did not forget to interrupt our work so that we reverently read ... "Angelus" for the poor dead."

The strength of the picture is in deep respect for the people who worked in this field, who loved and suffered on this sinful earth. In the humanistic beginning, the reason for the wide popularity of the canvas.

Years passed. Millet penetrated deeper and deeper into the very essence of nature. His landscapes, deeply lyrical, unusually subtly resolved, truly sound. They are, as it were, the answer to the dream of the painter himself.

"Stack". Twilight. Lilac, ashy haze. Slowly, slowly, the pearly sail of the young moon floats across the sky. The spicy, bitter aroma of fresh hay, the thick smell of warm earth are reminiscent of the sparkling sun, the multicolored meadows, and the bright summer day. Silence. The clatter of hooves sounds muffled. Tired horses roam. As if huge haystacks grow out of the ground. But just recently, the wind carried ringing girlish laughter, the laughter of guys, the cold squeal of steel braids, measured, hard. Somewhere nearby, the work of mowers was still in full swing. It's getting dark. Haystacks seem to melt in the coming darkness. Sansier said that Millet worked "as easily and naturally as a bird sings or a flower opens." "Hacks" is a complete confirmation of these words. By the end of his life, the artist had achieved complete looseness and incomprehensible subtlety of valers.

in 1874, Jean-Francois Millet paints his last canvas - "Spring". He is sixty years old. This is his testament...

"Spring". The downpour has passed. The whole world, as if washed, sparkled with fresh colors. Thunder still rumbles in the distance. Still, crowding each other, gray-haired, leaden masses of thunderclouds crawl across the sky. A purple lightning flashed. But the victorious sun broke through the stifling captivity of the clouds and lit a semi-precious rainbow. Rainbow is the beauty of spring. Let the bad weather frown, a cheerful wind drive the slate clouds away. We hear how the young, as if newly born earth, young grasses, shoots of branches breathe freely. Quiet. Suddenly a single drop fell with a crystal ringing. And again silence. Small houses pressed to the ground. White doves soar fearlessly high in the formidable sky. Blossoming apple trees are whispering about something. The muse of the master is young as never before.

“No, I don't want to die. This is too early. My work is not done yet. It's barely starting." These words were written by one of the greatest artists of the 19th century, Francois Millet.