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JEAN
FRANCOIS MILLET
Like Gustave Courbet. Millet was born into a relatively well-to-do , peasant family, but his education in the classics and his training as a painter, inevitably placed him in the new bour-geois class. But his loyalty to his origins and his dislike of city life meant that Millet settled in rural surroundings, in the village of Barbizon on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest south-east of Paris. Since the 1820s and 1830s Barbizon had become a popular haunt for the new landscape painters. Its countryside com-bined wild forest with calmer agricultural scenery, and it was close enough to Paris to enable painters to visit their color merchants, dealers, and the exhibitions held in the city. When Millet moved to Barbizon in 1849. escaping the cholera epidemic which followed the 1848 revolution in Paris, there was already a colony of artists there, including his friend, the landscapist Theodore Rousseau (1812- 1867). Millet's paintings of agricultural life, although imbued with a monumentality de-rived from Michelangelo (1475-1564), showed a new forthright directness in the representation of peasant life, which had hitherto been treated with idyllic - and unthreatening - sentimen-tality. His powerful, often large-scale treatment of subjects like The Sower, of which two painted versions date from 1850, was quite naturally seen as radical in an era when political rights were being demanded by agricultural workers. Landscape, usually the agricultural land-scape. played an important role in Millet's art throughout his career, but, in his later years, it came to dominate his output. However, even in his pure landscapes, there is always an implied human presence. In Autumn, The Haystacks, one of a series of four seasons commissioned late in his life. the human presence is indicated not only by the diminutive figure of the shep-herd, but also by the distant farm buildings and by those huge products of human toil, the hay-stacks themselves. The theme of the cycles of nature, whether seasonal or the hours of the day. has been a consistent feature of Millet's work, reflecting the endless, timeless round of labor which he saw as the lot of the agricul-tural worker. This particular cycle of four pictures derived from a series of large-scale pastel drawings, a medium used increasingly by Millet from the late 1850s on, and which proved an admirable substitute for the more expensive oil paintings among less wealthy collectors. His part in establishing the value of large-scale pastel drawings among collectors set an important precedent in the 1860s, which was later ex-ploited by Manet, Degas and Cassatt. Before this, pastel had either been downgraded by its association with women artists, or passed over because of its links with 'decadent' Rococo art in the eighteenth century, when pastel had been popular. However, with the revival of French Rococo and renewed admiration for Chardin (1699-1779) among mid and later nineteenth century artists, that stigma was removed. The large pastel seasons, of which only Spring. Summer and Autumn survive, were drawn between 1867 and 1873. The two earli-est, Summer and Autumn, were probably com-pleted by March 1868, and seen by the collector Frederic Hartmann, when he visited Millet in Barbizon. Hartmann had been dazzled by Millet's large pastels, when he had been shown one in Paris by Millet's friend and bio-grapher Alfred Sensier. Originally a patron of Theodore Rousseau. Hartmann became a patron of Millet after Rousseau's death in 1867. After Hartmann's visit to Barbizon in March 1868, Millet began work on the commissioned cycle of four seasons in oil, of which only the last, Winter, remains unfinished. The Autumn oil painting is based directly on the composition already worked out by Millet in pastel. In April 1868. Millet wrote to Sensier. re-questing him to have his color merchant Blanchet prepare four canvases especially for the work. Although the canvases are larger than the paper supports used for the pastel, their proportions are almost identical, and so transposing the design onto canvas presented no problems. The ground colors required by Millet for the oil paintings were carefully specified. Three were to be deep lilac rose and one was to be yellow ochre. However, the final canvases do not match with this order, as only two, Spring and Autumn, were actually executed on the lilac rose preparation, while Winter and. more obviously. Summer are unmistakably primed with yellow ochre. In Summer, the bright yellow ground was left to show through in many areas, unifying the colors of the composition and standing for the golden heat of the July buckwheat harvest. Autumn was painted between 1868 and 1874. It makes a fascinating comparison with the earlier pastel version, particularly in tech-nical terms, affording a contrast not only be-tween the two different media, but also between the effects of color over quite differently colored grounds. The pastel was executed on a dull. yellowy-buff colored paper, which unifies the pastel colors and is left to show through among them. As a result, the lowering, stormy warmth of the afternoon sky. produced by the lilac rose ground in the oil, is absent in the pastel. The pale, dusty colors of the pastel give an appearance of tranquility to the drawing, which, in the richer, more saturated oil colors, turns more to a sense of foreboding, with the impending storm heralding the arrival of win-ter. The lilac rose of the ground in the oil is made more violet, optically, by overlaying contrasting yellowish-greens in the sky. and the acid greens among the grass.
The earlier pastel drawing on which the ' oil painting was based. Where, the lilac pink of the ground under the oil gives a warm unity of light, the dull ochre yellow color of the paper support under the pastel has an entirely different effect. Instead, a somber overcast light is produced, suggesting a gray afternoon with no warm, sunset effect like that in the oil. Pastel and oil both lend themselves well to the rendering of natural textures. Perhaps the greatest contrast is in the handling of the sky, where fluid scum bles in the oil replace the linear build-up of color in the pastel. Both techniques allow the color of the support to play a vital role in the final effect. The paper support is not a standard format, but was cut to suit the compositional design Millet had in mind. The ground shows through among the sheep, where the artist's preparatory drawing-in of the broad contours of the composition in charcoal or black chalk is strongly in evidence. Millet's touch in pastel and oil is comparable. Although the oil binder inevitably makes the brushstrokes juicier, the use of added white and a dryish paint consistency have enabled Millet to create effects not dissimilar to those in the pastel, especially in the chalky, dragged strokes depicting the spiky, stubbly grass. The greater luminosity of the pastel stems from the absence of oil binder. The adventurous techniques of these late works show how Millet kept pushing forward with new ideas and methods, which were to have continuing relevance to following gener-ations of painters, from Pissarro and Degas to the later artists Seurat and van Gogh. An important exhibition of Millet's large-scale pastel pictures in 1875 came at an opportune moment for these younger artists, and the publication in 1881 of Sensier's magnificently illustrated biography of the artist, further rein-forced Millet's influence on the Impressionists.
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TITLE: Art Gallery, Fine Art Collection, Art History, Art Supply & Art Print |
ART Category: Art, Arts, Fantasy Art, Wildlife Art, Art Gallery, Fine Art, Art History, Art Print, Digital Art, Art Supply, African Art, 3d Art, Poster Art, Cartoon Art, Nude Art, Art Wall, Religious Art |
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