The figures in Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet\u2019s 1859 painting The Angelus, a French icon that\u2019s come to the UK on loan from the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay in Paris, seem extremely odd on close inspection. Their faces are obscure, their bodies intriguing under their shapeless work clothes. What age are they? How are they related? The man is quite young, his top shirt button loose, although his legs are as stiff as a doll\u2019s, inside thick, rough-cut trousers. It\u2019s harder to tell the woman\u2019s age because she stands in profile, a breeze pressing her heavy skirt against her legs, as she clasps her hands. They might be a married couple or, as this painting\u2019s unlikely fan Salvador Dal\u00ed claimed, mother and son. Their physicality is intense. The phallic prongs of a thick wooden potato fork and wheelbarrow shafts add to the feeling that, now the working day is done and they\u2019re saying their prayers, they can finally get to bed. But if they\u2019re mother and son? I refer you to Dr Dal\u00ed.<\/p>\n
Hello Dal\u00ed \u2026 detail from The Angelus by Millet Jean-Fran\u00e7ois. Photograph: Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet\/\u00a9 Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, Dist. Grand Palais Rmn \/ Patrice Schmidt<\/p>\n
I think there\u2019s a reason Millet makes The Angelus not so much a religious as an erotic landscape<\/a>. It was the climax of his love affair with the French peasantry. Millet made it his life\u2019s work to portray the rural poor \u2013 a class that had been denied full humanity. He depicts lives of backbreaking toil but wants you to see that, behind the hoe, is a human being with a mind, a body, desires.<\/p>\n Stark existential moments \u2026 The sower by Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet. Photograph: \u00a9 Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales<\/p>\n Landscape artists often can\u2019t draw the human figure for toffee: that means you, Constable and Turner. But Millet foregrounds the body in stark existential moments of sweaty action. Work that in reality must have been repetitive and mindless becomes full of heroic drama. In The Winnower, a man throws grains in the air in a golden mist to separate the wheat from the chaff. Painted at the time of the 1848 revolutions, when liberal and socialist risings were shaking the wheat from the chaff across Europe, the winnower is, you realise, wearing a reddish-pink bandana, a white shirt and has a blue handkerchief \u2013 the colours of the tricolour flag that the first French Revolution invented.<\/p>\n Millet\u2019s a revolutionary and his people have plenty to rebel against. In The Sower, a man is sowing seeds in a deep gully: it looks as if he has descended into hell. This pit looks completely barren yet here he is, sowing seeds anyway, the symbolism as hard to ignore as the arses of the two cows that loom against the stormy sky above him. His act may be that of a political campaigner, sowing seeds of change, yet it\u2019s also an image of artistic creativity. The character could be Millet himself, creating something beautiful out of the brutal realities of rural toil.<\/p>\n His autobiography is compacted into this small show. Millet was a country boy from Normandy. His painting The Well at Gruchy captures the world he grew up in \u2013 a woman fills pots of water from a stone-roofed well that appears to be centuries old. Life is slow there, in Gruchy, and history a massive, immobile presence. The Faggot Gatherers, which Millet was working on up to 1875, looks like a riposte to the impressionists\u2019 emphasis on modernity and middle-class pleasures on boulevards and in cafes. Women lug bundles of sticks through Stygian winter gloom in a scene that could just as easily have been in the 1370s as the 1870s.<\/p>\n Silent passions \u2026 The Goose Girl at Gruchy by Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet. Photograph: \u00a9 Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales<\/p>\n