Millet’s ‘Angelus’ and teh Erotic Landscape of Rural Life
A landmark exhibition at London’s National Gallery unveils the complex and frequently enough unsettling world of Jean-François Millet, revealing a revolutionary artist who imbued the lives of the French peasantry with both profound compassion and a simmering, subversive sexuality. The show, running from August 7th to October 19th, features works that challenge conventional interpretations of rural life, suggesting Millet saw not just toil and hardship, but also a potent, often hidden, eroticism.
Millet crafted The Angelus not as a purely religious work, but as an “erotic landscape,” a culmination of his deep engagement with the lives of the French peasantry. Millet dedicated his life to portraying the rural poor – a class historically denied full humanity – and sought to reveal the human being, with all their inherent desires, “behind the hoe.”
Millet’s ability to depict the human form in moments of intense physicality sets him apart.While some landscape artists struggled with figure drawing, Millet foregrounded the body in “stark existential moments of sweaty action.” He transformed repetitive,often mindless work into scenes of “heroic drama.” The Winnower, for example, depicts a man tossing grain to separate wheat from chaff, a seemingly mundane task elevated by the artist’s vision. Painted during the tumultuous 1848 revolutions, the winnower’s attire – a reddish-pink bandana, white shirt, and blue handkerchief – subtly references the colors of the French tricolor, hinting at a broader political undercurrent.
This revolutionary spirit permeates Millet’s oeuvre. The sower, a man casting seeds into a barren gully, evokes a descent into hell, yet embodies a defiant act of hope and creation. The symbolism is stark, as are the “arses of the two cows” looming against the stormy sky. The act of sowing can be interpreted as both a political statement – sowing seeds of change – and a metaphor for artistic creativity, with the artist himself possibly represented as the sower, forging beauty from harsh realities.
The exhibition reveals Millet’s personal history through his art. Born a country boy from Normandy, his painting The Well at Gruchy captures the slow pace and enduring presence of history in his upbringing.The Faggot gatherers, a work he continued refining until 1875, stands as a intentional contrast to the Impressionists’ focus on modernity and urban life, depicting women laboriously carrying bundles of sticks through a bleak, almost medieval landscape.
Millet’s influence extended to later generations of artists, notably Vincent van Gogh, who deeply admired his depictions of peasant life.This connection is evident in Millet’s drawing A Man ploughing and Another Sowing, where the figures, alongside a flock of crows rising into the sky, foreshadow imagery found in Van Gogh’s later works.
However, beyond his compassion, Millet’s art reveals a “turbulent sexuality.” The two figures in The Wood Sawyers are described as appearing to cut up a giant penis, a provocative image that invites interpretation, even prompting a comment from Dalí. His portraits of shepherdesses and milkmaids are similarly charged with a sensual energy, with van Gogh himself claiming Millet’s women were as alluring as those depicted by Émile Zola. This fascination with the “silent passions of country people” resonates with the themes explored in the novels of Thomas Hardy.
Ultimately, it is The Angelus to which the eye continually returns. The scene it depicts is timeless,the lives of the figures lost to history,yet Millet freezes them in a moment of profound stillness. Thay appear as statues, rooted to the earth from which they came, awaiting its eventual reclamation.
