To reach Life on the Land, the National Gallery’s exhibition on the nineteenth century French artist Jean-Francois Millet, you have to walk through rooms of the museum filled with centuries’ worth of grand portraits of society’s upper crust. On arrival, surrounded by dusky-toned renderings of outdoor labour, it might take a moment to adjust. Stoicism abounds here, its head bowed and its eyes averted.
You won’t find any grandeur or pomp in this concise exhibition of 15 muted and unflashy works, but you’ll experience an intensity rarely achieved in the portraits of nobility in the adjacent rooms. Millet’s images of peasants at work are rhythmic and visceral, unsentimental but deeply sensitive in their depictions of the beauty and harshness of a life working the land. The former can be found in the scenes’ wide horizons and the figures that punctuate them. The latter is best distilled in a detail of The Winnower (c. 1847–8), whose subject’s clogs are stuffed with hay to keep his feet warm.
The exhibition’s centrepiece, L’Angelus (1859), is here on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Like most of the work here, its ornate gilded frame feels incongruous with the painting itself, in which two shadowy figures stand statuesque in a twilit field, a basket of potatoes sitting on the ground between them. They could be staring at the ground, though their eyes, obscured by the enclosing darkness, might be closed. Just visible through lacy mist on the horizon is a church spire. The scene is climactic and heavy, with a feeling that’s difficult to pin down. You want to investigate its every square inch for a clue about the source of its emotional resonance: mourning? reconciliation? Love lost? Love found? It’s easy to understand why Salvador Dalí published a whole book on his interpretations of the painting.
Images of peasants at work are rhythmic and visceral, unsentimental but deeply sensitive
Whether Dalí came upon it or not, he was right to insist that the painting’s composition is meticulous, that everything is where it is for a reason. Millet often repeated the same subject multiple times, drilling down into each aspect of its depiction to strike what he found to be the perfect note, and my only wish is that this exhibition could have included a few more versions of his favourite subjects – like his oft-repeated sower, a figure who directly inspired several pastoral paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Still, the paintings and drawings that are here are a gift. As with L’Angelus, each one succeeds in doing what a lot of the best art does: like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks or Grant Wood’s American Gothic, it finds a mysterious way to fit the profound into the quotidian.
In other rooms of the National are paintings that bluff and bluster, using bright colours and vivid symbolism to insist on the significance of their subjects. Millet took a quieter and, to my eyes, more effective route. What’s happening in these paintings is simple and – at least to a nineteenth century peasant – familiar, painted dutifully and without embellishment. But you’ll leave with an intoxicating sense that what is happening here matters.
