Les+Glaneurs

 Les Glaneurs    … ||
 * || The Shooting Stars - Jean-Francois Millet ||

 [|Des Glaneuses]

 **Life Gleaning**

In her intimate film “Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse”, Agnes Varda directs her

lens at the curious lives of various salvagers, recyclers, bottom feeders,

and junk artists who find the subsistence of life in the scraps left behind.

But the film is as much a self-portrait, an end of life gaze at a certain kind of

“gleaner” for whom culling and scavenging human society and nature has

been life itself, a passionate //raison d’être//.

Provide your own observations and assessment of the film. What did you

glean from Vardas’ vignettes and vignette? Interpret the final scene, in

which Vardas has a painting by another 19th c. French “Realist”,

Hèdouin, retrieved from storage and brought into the overcast windy

ambiance of a small court yard. The title of the painting is “Gleaners

fleeing before the storm.” Why, along with the portrait of the eccentric but

saintly biologist, does Varda call this the “high point” of her film.


 * [[image:http://www.jeanmillet.org/137466/Self-Portrait,-c.1845-46-large.jpg caption="Self Portrait, c.1845-46 - Jean-Francois Millet"]] ||
 * Self Portrait, c.1845-46 - Jean-Francois Millet ||

 **Jean-François Millet** (October 4, 1814 – January 20, 1875) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. He is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers. He can be categorized as part of the movement termed "naturalism", but also as part of the movement of "realism".

Life and work

Millet was the first child of Jean-Louis-Nicolas and Aimée-Henriette-Adélaïde Henry Millet, members of the peasant community in the village of Gruchy, in Gréville-Hague (Normandy).[1] Under the guidance of two village priests, Millet acquired a knowledge of Latin and modern authors, before being sent to Cherbourg in 1833 to study with a portrait painter named Paul Dumouchel. By 1835 he was studying full-time with Lucien-Théophile Langlois, a pupil of Baron Gros, in Cherbourg. A stipend provided by Langlois and others enabled Millet to move to Paris in 1837, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Paul Delaroche. In 1839 his scholarship was terminated, and his first submission to the Salon was rejected.[2]
 * Youth**

After his first painting, a portrait, was accepted at the Salon of 1840, Millet returned to Cherbourg to begin a career as a portrait painter. However, the following year he married Pauline-Virginie Ono, and they moved to Paris. After rejections at the Salon of 1843 and Pauline's death by consumption, Millet returned again to Cherbourg.[3] In 1845 Millet moved to Le Havre with Catherine Lemaire, whom he would marry in a civil ceremony in 1853; they would have nine children, and remain together for the rest of Millet's life.[4] In Le Havre he painted portraits and small genre pieces for several months, before moving back to Paris. It was in Paris in the middle 1840s that Millet befriended Constant Troyon, Narcisse Diaz, Charles Jacque, and Théodore Rousseau, artists who, like Millet, would become associated with the Barbizon school; Honoré Daumier, whose figure draftsmanship would influence Millet's subsequent rendering of peasant subjects; and Alfred Sensier, a government bureaucrat who would become a lifelong supporter and eventually the artist's biographer.[5] In 1847 his first Salon success came with the exhibition of a painting //Oedipus Taken down from the Tree//, and in 1848 his //Winnower// was bought by the government.
 * Paris**

In 1849 Millet painted //Harvesters//, a commission for the state. In the Salon of that year he exhibited //Shepherdess Sitting at the Edge of the Forest//, a very small oil which marked a turning away from previous idealized pastoral subjects, in favor of a more realistic and personal approach.[6] In June of that year he settled in Barbizon with Catherine and their children.
 * Barbizon**

In 1850 Millet entered into an arrangement with Sensier, who provided the artist with materials and money in return for drawings and paintings, while Millet simultaneously was free to continue selling work to other buyers as well.[7] At that year's Salon he exhibited //Haymakers// and //The Sower//, his first major masterpiece and the earliest of the iconic trio of paintings that would include //The Gleaners// and //T//

From 1850 to 1853 Millet worked on //Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz)//, a painting he would consider his most important, and on which he worked the longest. Conceived to rival his heroes Michelangelo and Poussin, it was also the painting that marked his transition from the depiction of symbolic imagery of peasant life to that of contemporary social conditions. It was the only painting he ever dated, and was the first work to garner him official recognition, a second-class medal at the 1853 salon.[9]


 * [[image:http://www.jeanmillet.org/118648/Harvesters-Resting-(or-Ruth-and-Boaz)-large.jpg caption="Harvesters Resting (or Ruth and Boaz) - Jean-Francois Millet"]] ||
 * Harvesters Resting (or Ruth and Boaz) - Jean-Francois Millet ||

 **//The Gleaners//**

This is one of the most well known of Millet's paintings, //The Gleaners(1857),// Walking the fields around Barbizon one theme returned to Millet's pencil and brush for seven years—gleaning—the centuries old right of poor women and children to remove the bits grain left in the fields following the harvest. He found the theme an eternal one, linked to stories from the Old Testament. In 1857, he submitted the painting //The Gleaners// to the Salon to an unenthusiastic even hostile public. (Earlier versions include a vertical composition painted in 1854, an etching of 1855-56 which directly presaged the horizontal format of the painting now in the Musée d'Orsay.[10]) A warm golden light suggests something sacred and eternal in this daily scene where the struggle to survive takes place. During his years of preparatory studies Millet contemplated how to best convey the sense of repetition and fatigue in the peasant's daily lives. Lines traced over each woman’s back lead to the ground and then back up in a repetitive motion identical to their unending, backbreaking labor. Along the horizon, the setting sun silhouettes the farm with its abundant stacks of grain, in contrast to the large shadowy figures in the foreground. The dark homespun dresses of the gleaners cut robust forms against the golden field, giving each woman a noble, monumental strength.
 * [[image:http://www.jeanmillet.org/174715/Gleaners-large.jpg caption="Gleaners - Jean-Francois Millet"]] ||
 * Gleaners - Jean-Francois Millet ||

 **//The Angelus//**

Commissioned by a wealthy American, Thomas G. Appleton, and completed during the summer of 1857, Millet added a steeple and changed the initial title of the work, //Prayer for the Potato Crop// to //The Angelus// when the purchaser failed to take possession in 1859. Displayed to the public for the first time in 1865, the painting changed hands several times, increasing only modestly in value, since some considered the artist's political sympathies suspect. Upon Millet's death a decade later, a bidding war between the US and France ensued, ending some years later with a price tag of 800,000 gold francs. The disparity between the apparent value of the painting and the poor estate of Millet's surviving family was a major impetus in the invention of the droit de suite, intended to compensate artists or their heirs when works are resold.[11]


 * [[image:http://www.jeanmillet.org/175405/Angelus-(Angelus-Domini)-large.jpg caption="Angelus (Angelus Domini) - Jean-Francois Millet"]] ||
 * Angelus (Angelus Domini) - Jean-Francois Millet ||

 **Later years** Despite mixed reviews of the paintings he exhibited at the Salon, Millet's reputation and success grew through the 1860s. At the beginning of the decade he contracted to paint 25 works in return for a monthly stipend for the next three years, and in 1865 another patron, Emile Gavet, began commissioning pastels for a collection that would eventually include 90 works.[12] In 1867 the Exposition Universelle hosted a major showing of his work, with the //Gleaners//, //Angelus//, and //Potato Planters// among the paintings exhibited. The following year Frédéric Hartmann commissioned //Four Seasons// for 25,000 francs, and Millet was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.[13]

In 1870 Millet was elected to the Salon jury. Later that year he and his family fled the Franco-Prussian War, moving to Cherbourg and Gréville, and did not return to Barbizon until late in 1871. His last years were marked by financial success and increased official recognition, but he was unable to fulfill government commissions due to failing health. On January 3, 1875 he married Catherine in a religious ceremony. Millet died on January 20, 1875.[14]


 * [[image:http://www.jeanmillet.org/74612/Man-With-A-Hoe-large.jpg caption="Man With A Hoe - Jean-Francois Millet"]] ||
 * Man With A Hoe - Jean-Francois Millet ||

 Legacy Millet was an important source of inspiration for Vincent van Gogh, particularly during his early period. Millet and his work are mentioned many times in Vincent's letters to his brother Theo. Millet's late landscapes would serve as influential points of reference to Claude Monet's paintings of the coast of Normandy; his structural and symbolic content influenced Georges Seurat as well.[15] Millet is the main protagonist of Mark Twain's play //Is He Dead?// (1898), in which he is depicted as a struggling young artist who fakes his death to score fame and fortune. Most of the details about Millet in the play are fictional. Millet's painting //L'homme à la houe// inspired the famous poem "The Man With the Hoe" (1898) by Edwin Markham. The //Angelus// was reproduced frequently in the 19th and 20th centuries. Salvador Dalí was fascinated by this work, and wrote an analysis of it, //The Tragic Myth of The Angelus of Millet//. Rather than seeing it as a work of spiritual peace, Dalí believed it held messages of repressed sexual aggression. Dalí was also of the opinion that the two figures were praying over their buried child, rather than to the Angelus. Dalí was so insistent on this fact that eventually an X-ray was done of the canvas, confirming his suspicions: the painting contains a painted-over geometric shape strikingly similar to a coffin.[16] However, it is unclear whether Millet changed his mind on the meaning of the painting, or even if the shape actually is a coffin.


 * //The Gleaners//** (//Des glaneuses//) is an oil painting by Jean-François Millet composed in 1857. It depicts three peasant women gleaning a field of stray grains of wheat after the harvest. The painting is famous for monumentalizing what were then the lowest ranks of rural society. The painting was received poorly by the French upper class.

History Millet first unveiled //The Gleaners// at the Salon in 1857. It immediately drew negative criticism from the middle and upper classes, who viewed the topic with suspicion: one art critic, speaking for other Parisians, perceived in it an alarming intimation of "the scaffolds of 1793."[1] Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker.[1] To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism and the dangerous voices of Karl Marx and Émile Zola.[2] One critic commented that "his three gleaners have gigantic pretensions, they pose as the Three Fates of Poverty…their ugliness and their grossness unrelieved."[3] While the act of gleaning was not a new topic—representations of Ruth had already been composed—this new work was a statement on rural poverty and not Biblical piety:[3] there is no touch of the Biblical sense of community and compassion in Millet's contrast of the embodiments of grinding poverty in the foreground and the rich harvest in the sunlit distance beyond. The implicit irony was unsettling. After the Salon, Millet, short on money, sold his piece for 3,000 francs—below his asking price of 4,000,[4] haggling with an Englishman named Binder who would not budge for his meagre counter-offer; Millet tried to keep the miserable price a secret.[5] While //The Gleaners// garnered little but notoriety during his life, after his death in 1875, public appreciation of his work steadily broadened. In 1889, the painting sold for 300,000 francs at auction.[4] The following year it was donated to the State and now resides in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The Gleaners is also an example of Realism Art.

Composition

What does //The Gleaners// show? [The women] embody an animal force deeply absorbed by a painstaking task. The contrast between wealth and poverty, power and helplessness, male and female spheres is forcefully rendered. — Liana Vardi[6]

//The Gleaners// features three peasant women prominently in the foreground, stooping to glean the last scraps of a wheat harvest. Their gaze does not meet the viewer, and their faces are obscured. In the background, bountiful amounts of wheat are being stacked while a landlord overseer stands watch on the right. Millet has chosen to center the women and paint them with a greater contrast. The earthy figures blend into the color of the piece, ingraining them well into the scene.


 * [[image:http://www.jeanmillet.org/137401/The-Sower,-1850-large.jpg caption="The Sower, 1850 - Jean-Francois Millet"]] ||
 * The Sower, 1850 - Jean-Francois Millet ||

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