Les bêcheurs (The diggers)

Jean-Francois Millet (1814-75) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers; he can be categorised, along with his near contemporary, Gustave Courbet, as a principal exponent of the Realism art movement.

In his classic monograph on the artist, <em>Jean-François Millet. Painter of Labour </em>(1916), Charles Henry Collins wrote of this work:

'One of Millet's finest designs, this etching has a largeness of style and decorative purpose that would fit it to be enlarged to life-size. The spacing of the limbs, the emphasis given to rhythmic action and thrust-resisting lines are the outcome of profound science as well as of an instinct for great essentials. It seems improbable that the motif of this etching - the stubborn strength, the rude power of field labourers - will ever be better expressed pictorially. The character and life of these men is given us in this statement of, apparently, but a moment in their day. Their action and environment are made to carry a symbolic meaning; they typify a race of peasants. Thus Millet's work is monumental, giving once for all a general and enduring expression of peasant life and labour.'

Millet's etching was made at almost the same time as his painting of the subject (Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth)  and dates from a decade of remarkable productivity of emotionally resonant masterworks, including <em>The Sower</em> (1850), <em>The Gleaners</em> (1857) and <em>The Angelus</em> (1857-59). Vincent van Gogh, whose admiration of Millet as a 'conviction artist' of the rural poor was second to none, made a drawing and a painting after <em>The diggers</em> some thirty years later.

See:

The Allinson Gallery, 'Jean-Francois Millet 1814-1875', http://www.allinsongallery.com/millet/becheurs.html

Wikipedia, 'Jean-Francois Millet', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    May 2018