Jean-François Millet, L’Angélus, 1857- 9, oil on canvas, 55.5 x 66cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (RF 1877) [© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. Grand Palais Rmn / Patrice Schmidt]

AN undoubtedly harsh view has been taken in the past of a 19th-century French artist who is the subject of the latest in a series of smaller, focused, and free exhibitions* at The National Gallery that have included the cartoons by Agostino and Annibale Carracci earlier this year and the highly successful The Last Caravaggio during its 2024 bicentenary.

At the heart of this new show, Millet: Life on the Land is a spectacular loan by the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, of the most famous work by Jean-François Millet (1814-1895), its title L’Angélus.

And the painting’s fame is partly down to Salvador Dali’s subsequent championing of it, and others copying it, as the gallery’s director Sir Gabriele Finaldi notes: “The exceptional loan…will focus the public’s attention on this fascinating artist, a painter of rural life, who was sometimes accused of being a dangerous anarchist. Salvador Dali’s obsession with L’Angélus made it even more famous”.

And The Angelus sold at auction in 1889 for 553,000 francs, at that time a record for any modern picture.

All this is a far cry from the view of one scholar writing just a few decades ago in the Oxford Companion to Art, who referred to Millet as a “mediocre” colourist “with little sense of tone values” and noted that his “fault lay in sentimentality”.

All seem agreed, though, that Millet, who was from a peasant farming family and born in Gruchy near Cherbourg, drew extremely well and had an ability to avoid the inessential and lend a monumentality to his works. Sentimentality simply doesn’t fit as a criticism of these, whether the subjects are from around Gruchy or the Barbizon area, to which Millet moved in 1849.

Jean-François Millet, The Faggot Gatherers, c.1850-5, oil on panel, 30.4 x 18cm, National Gallery of Scotland [Accepted in lieu of Estate Duty by HM Government from the Craigmyle Collection, and allocated to the National Galleries of Scotland, 2020 (NG 2887) © National Galleries of Scotland]

As Sarah Herring, show curator and the gallery’s associate curator of post 1800 paintings, says: “Millet endowed rural labourers with dignity and nobility, depicting them in drawings and paintings with empathy and compassion.”

Of course, that made him stand out from his contemporaries. Indeed, the central figures in the Musée d’Orsay painting, a man and woman, have temporarily stopped their work to recite the Angelus prayer traditionally celebrated three times daily at six, noon and six.

There are 15 of Millet’s works featured in this exhibition and they include the National’s own The Winnower, the worker using a shallow basket to separate grain from chaff and an early example of the artist’s depictions of peasant life; and there’s a definite nod to the political turbulence of revolutionary 1848, the year it was well received at the Salon.

Apart from L’Angélus, the paintings and drawings here are gathered from around Britain, including The Faggot Gatherers and black chalk drawings

A Shepherdess and Wood Choppers from Scotland; and from The National Museum of Wales there are oils of a sower, and The Goose Girl at Gruchy, and an unfinished work with a similar title, The Faggot Gatherers.

The V&A offers wood sawyers and painting of the well at Gruchy; and the Ashmolean museum’s black crayon drawing of two men, one ploughing the other sowing, is finely detailed, delicate, and to the point.

Millet’s use of a high horizon line to achieve his preferred effect is often apparent and A Milkmaid from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham is a characteristic example of his use of a silhouette.

• Millet: Life on the Land runs till October 19 in Room 1 at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square,
*part of the HJ Hyams Exhibition Programme, supported by the charity, The Capricorn Foundation.
www.nationalgallery

A Scully special

Sean Scully, Blue Wall, 2024 (detail), oil on copper, 50 x 50cm, copyright Sean Scully, courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac

ROYAL Academician Sean Scully will be presenting what’s described as a “special intervention” in Canonbury in October at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.

The Dublin-born artist, now 80, first encountered the work of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) as a student through the Tate’s collection and was particularly struck by a still life from 1946.

Scully says: “Passing through the halls of the Tate gallery in London, looking for role models, I would consistently pass a typically small painting by Morandi. It seemed to upset and disturb everything else that was going on.”

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Five Objects, 1956, etching, 14 x 19.9cm, courtesy Estorick Collection

The Estorick will host Sean Scully: Mirroring from October 8 to November 23 with 20 of his works to be shown alongside a dozen drawings and etchings by Morandi.

The Estorick say “many of these new or rarely seen works trace the arc of Scully’s practice, from early representation to geometric abstraction and eventually back to figuration, a journey that mirrors Morandi’s own evolving trajectory.”

Details: estorickcollection.com