A new exhibition at London's National Gallery is offering visitors an intimate look at the complex world of Jean-François Millet, the French painter who elevated rural peasant life to high art while infusing it with unexpected sexuality and revolutionary symbolism. The show, titled "Millet: Life on the Land," runs from August 7 through October 19 and features several masterworks on loan from Paris's Musée d'Orsay.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Millet's iconic 1859 painting "The Angelus," which has traveled from France to the UK for this rare showing. Upon close examination, the two figures in this famous work appear surprisingly mysterious and provocative. Their faces remain obscured, while their bodies create intrigue beneath loose-fitting work clothes. The relationship between the man and woman is deliberately ambiguous - they could be a married couple or, as the painting's unlikely admirer Salvador Dalí suggested, mother and son.
The young man stands with his top shirt button undone, though his legs appear stiff as a doll's inside thick, roughly-cut trousers. The woman, shown in profile with a breeze pressing her heavy skirt against her legs as she clasps her hands in prayer, is harder to age. The sexual undertones become more apparent when considering the prominent placement of a thick wooden potato fork with phallic prongs and suggestive wheelbarrow shafts. These details contribute to the sense that now that the working day has ended and prayers are being said, the couple can finally retire to bed together.
Millet's decision to make "The Angelus" more erotic than religious reflects his passionate commitment to portraying the French peasantry as fully human. Throughout his career, Millet dedicated himself to depicting the rural poor - a social class that had been denied recognition of their complete humanity. While he shows their lives of backbreaking labor, he wants viewers to understand that behind every farm tool stands a human being with thoughts, physical needs, and desires.
Unlike many landscape artists who struggle with human figures - including notable painters like Constable and Turner - Millet excels at placing the human body at the center of dramatic, existential moments filled with physical exertion. Work that in reality must have been repetitive and mind-numbing becomes transformed into scenes of heroic drama under his brush.
His painting "The Winnower" shows a man throwing grain into the air, creating a golden mist as he separates wheat from chaff. Created during the revolutionary year of 1848, when liberal and socialist uprisings were reshaping Europe, the winnower notably wears a reddish-pink bandana, white shirt, and blue handkerchief - the exact colors of the tricolour flag created during the first French Revolution. This color choice reveals Millet's revolutionary sympathies.
Millet's political consciousness appears throughout his work, with his subjects having plenty of reasons for rebellion. "The Sower" depicts a man planting seeds in what appears to be a deep pit or gully, as if he has descended into hell itself. The barren-looking ground seems incapable of supporting life, yet the sower continues his work regardless. The symbolism proves impossible to ignore, especially with two cows positioned prominently against the stormy sky above, their rear ends visible. The sower's actions could represent those of a political activist planting seeds of change, or they might symbolize artistic creativity itself - perhaps Millet creating beauty from the harsh realities of rural labor.
The exhibition traces Millet's personal history through his artwork. Born and raised in Normandy, Millet remained connected to his rural roots throughout his career. His painting "The Well at Gruchy" captures the world of his childhood, showing a woman filling water pots from an ancient stone-roofed well that appears centuries old. Life moves slowly in Gruchy, where history feels like a massive, unchanging presence.
"The Faggot Gatherers," which occupied Millet until 1875, seems designed as a direct response to the Impressionists' focus on modernity and middle-class leisure activities in urban boulevards and cafes. Instead, Millet shows women struggling through dark winter gloom while carrying heavy bundles of sticks, in a scene that could have occurred in the 1370s just as easily as the 1870s.
Millet found an devoted admirer in Vincent van Gogh, who desperately sought spiritual meaning in the modern world and wanted to follow Millet's example as a painter of peasant life. Their deep artistic connection becomes clear in Millet's drawing "A Man Ploughing and Another Sowing," where a worn-down sower stumbles in the foreground while a ploughman hunches behind him, as a flock of black crows rises into the sky - similar to the birds van Gogh would paint over wheatfields near the end of his life.
Despite his brooding compassion for rural workers, Millet's turbulent sexuality permeates his art. The two muscular men in "The Wood Sawyers" appear to be cutting up what resembles a giant phallus, though the sliced tree trunk sections also look like freshly butchered meat - another detail that would have appealed to Salvador Dalí's surrealist sensibilities.
Millet's portraits of shepherdesses and milkmaids contain more conventional sexual undertones. "The Goose Girl at Gruchy" may represent memories of adolescent desires as much as direct observation from life. Van Gogh, writing in a passionate letter, claimed that Millet's female subjects were as sexually charged as those in Émile Zola's novels. This observation highlights how much Millet's fascination with the unspoken passions of country people resembles the rural characters in Thomas Hardy's literature.
All these themes converge in "The Angelus," which visitors find themselves returning to repeatedly after viewing Millet's other works. The scene captures something ancient and timeless, representing lives that have largely vanished from history. Millet freezes his subjects like statues, showing them as if they have grown from the hard earth like grass, with the same soil waiting patiently to reclaim them.
The exhibition demonstrates how Millet transformed the traditional hierarchy of artistic subjects, elevating peasant laborers to the heroic status typically reserved for mythological figures or aristocrats. His work bridges the gap between social realism and romantic idealization, creating images that are simultaneously documentary and deeply symbolic. Through his unique vision, backbreaking agricultural work becomes a form of secular worship, while maintaining an undercurrent of human sexuality and political awareness that gives his rural scenes their lasting power and complexity.
