Jean-François Millet: 9 works

'Through a tightly controlled composition and a careful balance of monochromatic tones, Millet captured Louise-Antoinette's self-containment, reserve, and poised composure.'

'Before Jean-François Millet achieved international success as a painter of peasant life, he earned his early living as a portraitist.'

'Jean-François Millet was the artist that van Gogh most revered. Although he never saw Millet's famous Sower - already in a Boston collection before he was born - van Gogh admired Millet's other treatments of the theme, and sought to emulate them.'

'Born in Gruchy, France, to a family of farmers, Jean-François Millet referred to himself as the "painter of peasants." In 1837, as a student of the history painter Paul Delaroche, he met fellow pupil Théodore Rousseau.'

'Millet's idealized image of maternal devotion and domestic harmony was meant to celebrate the virtues of the French peasant class--patience, diligence, perseverance--and the dignity and continuity of life on the land.'

'In a wealth of tones hidden in deep shadows, Jean-François Millet evoked the story's haunting mystery.'

'"(A)s I have never seen anything but fields since I was born, I try to say as best I can what I saw and felt when I was at work," wrote Jean-François Millet.'

'He exhibited the painting, now in Paris's Musée d'Orsay, to great acclaim at the Salon of 1864.'

'Upon the premature death of his wife, he left Cherbourg for Le Havre, in search of a new clientele. The Portrait of Charles-André Langevin belongs to a series of important figures from Le Havre painted by Millet in 1845.'