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Jean-François Millet (1814-1875)
France, c. 1868
Pastel
69 x 93 cm
Inv. no. 89
As a leading member of the Barbizon School, Millet contributed to the development of a new form of naturalism. The relationship between man and his environment, handled with a sense of fatalism, was the central theme of Millet’s work, continuing the tradition of Bruegel and also heralding the highly individual art that Van Gogh would produce shortly after.
This austere and melancholic landscape – a hymn to nature and rural life – was one of a series of paintings of vast open fields that he produced in the 1860s. The minimal use of colour suggests the desolate, harsh atmosphere, simultaneously emphasising the artist’s vision of a grey world. Millet’s area of work is the silence of the frozen plain, the boundless horizon, the cyclical harshness of the season and the lonely space where the almost imperceptible figure of Man is symbolically positioned.
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