'Millet, Life on the Land' (National Gallery until October 19 2025)

Jean-François Millet, The Wood Sawyers, c.1851, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

It has been a very long time since the last exhibition dedicated to Jean-François Millet and I suppose that is reason enough to welcome the National Gallery’s Life on the Land. The current show is, however, a meagre affair, built around the admittedly substantial coup of the Angelus loaned from the Musée d'Orsay, but without depth or substance. One room and a handful of works does not lend itself to a successful survey of a prolific artist who had a thirty year career. Equally, Life on the Land is simply too broad a title and ambition. A better show would have been more focused, perhaps on the central theme of the Angelus - faith - or, even more conducive to a contemporary audience, Millet's clear gendering. One can see that the curators wanted to include the National's own Winnower but they miss the opportunity afforded by the available works to construct an interesting narrative around action and stillness. As it is, a disparate selection of seemingly random pieces (anything they National could acquire from British museums) are not given enough cohesion and simply left this viewer wanting more.

Millet is unfashionable and problematic for 21st century tastes, hardly surprising when one considers that even his contemporaries didn’t really know what to make of him. One time posterboy of the 1848 radicals: the Winnower was bought by member of the short-lived Republican government, he became the darling of conservatives who saw his religious, stoic peasantry as the reliable backbone of France. A victim of his own mythologising, he was labelled the 'peasant painter' by his first biographer, Alfred Sensier: the Normandy lad who made good in Paris but never really left the land. Ever since, writers have felt compelled to debunk that version: Millet was aloof from his Barbizon neighbours, he read Virgil, he didn’t attend church, even to marry. Whatever the unknowable truth, he represented the rural poor with a commitment, clarity and earnestness which no other 19th century French artist could match. He had none of Courbet's in-your-face stridency nor, even in his milkmaids and goose girls, the saccharine academicism of Jules Breton. Only Jules Bastien Lepage comes close, imbuing his chunkily awkward figures with a pallid clarity which does little to disguise his debt to the older artist.

Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857-9, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Arguably Millet carried on resolutely doing the same thing whilst the world shifted and French politics whirled around him. In that sense he was a painters' painter, beloved by Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro, and all the politicised readings miss the point. Millet's canvases are like a rich winter stew, complex and layered, warmly satisfying even when composed of the most mundane ingredients. They are hearty in a literal sense, creating a meaningful connection across time and space with figures who are not only beyond our experience, but, largely featureless and introverted, defiant in their disconnection from us. In the absence of detail, of expression, of eye contact, he achieves an emotional bridge though brushwork and colour. You are in the barn with the Winnower , dust catching in your throat, feeling the effort in his back, the scratch of the straw in his sabots, the subtle power of a grip which can flick up the basket with practiced precision. In the same way you can hear the Angelus bell, perhaps with the impatience some have read into the man's twirling of his cap, perhaps ominously -  Dali imagined a grave in the foreground - perhaps elegiacally with the sunset. 

What the exhibition does provide are examples of Millet's drawings, energised, vigorous and gestural in their determination to capture the reality of pose and movement. There is much speculation about whether these were done on location, or from posed studio models: I suspect a combination of the two. It seems of little consequence when the intention is so clear. Millet laboured to represent labour because it mattered, a case of basic survival for women bent double with the burden of scraggly twigs which one imagines would burn within moments, for girls old beyond their years charged with watching geese or sheep, for landless men earning a pittance or a couple grateful for their scrap of earth. He had been there and the reality of what he saw in Barbizon was so overlaid with Millet's own memories of childhood that the paint soaked up his empathy and understanding. In that sense I find him akin to Constable, another artist whose deep affinity with the agricultural countryside is misunderstood today.

The National Gallery exhibition might be a missed opportunity (it is for instance far less successful than their similarly sized show about the Haywain) but it reminds us why Millet was so popular and why he remains so compelling. It’s not about politics or religion; it’s not, as Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian seems to think, about sex. It's not about realism either. Millet was an old romantic. It’s all about love. Love of the land and love of his materials. Stand close and relish the gnarly brushwork and the writhing lines and the unctuous, oozing colour. One room is as paltry as the stoney ground Millet so often portrays but even here you can glean so much.