{"id":7145,"date":"2025-09-10T11:08:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T11:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/7145\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T11:08:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T11:08:13","slug":"a-no-kings-movement-for-19th-century-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/7145\/","title":{"rendered":"A No Kings Movement for 19th-Century Art\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2014 How best to paint the scorned, the marginalized, the lost to view?\u00a0<\/p>\n

This was the challenge that faced the French artist Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet in the middle years of the 19th century. His subject was the peasantry who worked on the land, owners of small plots of their own, or itinerant laborers such as a sawyer who, swiftly and dangerously, would take down your diseased tree and chop it into pieces for the local women to haul away on their backs, almost doubled down under the weight of it all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite the fact that Millet was a hero to van Gogh for the way he drew attention to the nobility and heroism of the seldom howling underdog, the man himself has been little on public view in London in recent years. In fact, Life on the Land<\/a> at the National Gallery is his first significant outing for half a century. It is well worth the wait.<\/p>\n

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\t\tJean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet, \u201cThe Goose Girl at Gruchy\u201d (1854\u201346), oil on canvas; Lent by Amgueddfa Cymru \u2013 Museum Wales (\u00a9 Amgueddfa Cymru \u2013 National Museum Wales)\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Millet himself was born into relative prosperity. His family farm was in the hilly, lush countryside surrounding the village of Gruchy in Normandy. From there he traveled south to the flat plain of Barbizon, not far from Paris.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This exhibition is relatively modest in size. The walls are painted a rich, deep blue, which helps to vivify this fairly compact gathering of 15 paintings and six drawings. The works seem to draw in on themselves, thereby enriching their singular presence here.<\/p>\n

Millet was very interested in the postures of his figures \u2014 how they bend, lean, twist, turn, and heave on whatever tools they might have to hand. Theirs is backbreaking work, endured over long hours. He was much given to portraying the peasantry in shoes, usually clogs. In contrast, many painters of this time were inclined to show them shoeless, as if the earth beneath one\u2019s feet was a soft carpet for skipping over. Not so. Nature has its rocks, stones, and briars. A sentimental Parisian idealist with no experience of the countryside would probably know nothing of such thorny matters.<\/p>\n

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\t\tJean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet, \u201cA Shepherdess\u201d (about 1856), black chalk with touches of blue chalk on pale buff paper; National Gallery of Scotland (\u00a9 National Galleries of Scotland)<\/p>\n

One of the exhibition\u2019s most dramatic paintings, \u201cWood Sawyers\u201d (1850\u201352), is about hard, sheer physical labor. Two sawyers are engaged in the sweaty push and pull of chopping up a huge felled tree. How they lean and bend into their task, bracing themselves, toiling against, fighting back! The men seem so small when set against the heft, weight, and muscular presence of the mighty trunk. The man with his back to us, his slightly bowed legs wide spread in gleaming emerald trousers, has an undoubted elegance about him \u2014 as do so many of Millet\u2019s rural laborers, who often worked alone in fields. Part of his task was to draw attention to their dignity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His paintings often divided the critics of his time. Conservatives condemned him as a covert subversive, and perhaps even a dangerous radical, while progressives applauded the fact that he turned his back on the gaudy glitter of kings, potentates, and dignitaries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like these two sawyers, he painted on, not to be deflected from the task at hand. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tJean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet, \u201cThe Winnower\u201d\u00a0(about 1847\u201348), oil on canvas (\u00a9 The National Gallery, London)
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\t\tJean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet, \u201cA Man ploughing and Another sowing\u201d (1849\u201352), black crayon on paper; The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (\u00a9 Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tJean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet, \u201cA Milkmaid\u201d (about 1853), oil on canvas (\u00a9 The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham)
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\t\tJean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet, \u201cL\u2019Ang\u00e9lus\u201d (1857\u201359), oil on canvas; Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, Paris (\u00a9 Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, Dist. Grand Palais Rmn \/ Patrice Schmidt)<\/p>\n

Millet: Life on the Land<\/a> continues at the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square, London England) through October 19.\u00a0The exhibition was curated by Sarah Herring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON \u2014 How best to paint the scorned, the marginalized, the lost to view?\u00a0 This was the challenge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46,442,8269],"class_list":["post-7145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-london","tag-national-gallery-london"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}