LONDON — How best to paint the scorned, the marginalized, the lost to view?
This was the challenge that faced the French artist Jean-François Millet in the middle years of the 19th century. His subject was the peasantry who worked on the land, owners of small plots of their own, or itinerant laborers such as a sawyer who, swiftly and dangerously, would take down your diseased tree and chop it into pieces for the local women to haul away on their backs, almost doubled down under the weight of it all.
Despite the fact that Millet was a hero to van Gogh for the way he drew attention to the nobility and heroism of the seldom howling underdog, the man himself has been little on public view in London in recent years. In fact, Life on the Land at the National Gallery is his first significant outing for half a century. It is well worth the wait.
Millet himself was born into relative prosperity. His family farm was in the hilly, lush countryside surrounding the village of Gruchy in Normandy. From there he traveled south to the flat plain of Barbizon, not far from Paris.
This exhibition is relatively modest in size. The walls are painted a rich, deep blue, which helps to vivify this fairly compact gathering of 15 paintings and six drawings. The works seem to draw in on themselves, thereby enriching their singular presence here.
Millet was very interested in the postures of his figures — how they bend, lean, twist, turn, and heave on whatever tools they might have to hand. Theirs is backbreaking work, endured over long hours. He was much given to portraying the peasantry in shoes, usually clogs. In contrast, many painters of this time were inclined to show them shoeless, as if the earth beneath one’s feet was a soft carpet for skipping over. Not so. Nature has its rocks, stones, and briars. A sentimental Parisian idealist with no experience of the countryside would probably know nothing of such thorny matters.
One of the exhibition’s most dramatic paintings, “Wood Sawyers” (1850–52), is about hard, sheer physical labor. Two sawyers are engaged in the sweaty push and pull of chopping up a huge felled tree. How they lean and bend into their task, bracing themselves, toiling against, fighting back! The men seem so small when set against the heft, weight, and muscular presence of the mighty trunk. The man with his back to us, his slightly bowed legs wide spread in gleaming emerald trousers, has an undoubted elegance about him — as do so many of Millet’s rural laborers, who often worked alone in fields. Part of his task was to draw attention to their dignity.
His paintings often divided the critics of his time. Conservatives condemned him as a covert subversive, and perhaps even a dangerous radical, while progressives applauded the fact that he turned his back on the gaudy glitter of kings, potentates, and dignitaries.
Like these two sawyers, he painted on, not to be deflected from the task at hand.
Millet: Life on the Land continues at the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square, London England) through October 19. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Herring.