Artists

Jean François Millet Art Prints

Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875)

6 museum-quality prints of works by Jean François Millet, each made to order on archival paper and shipped to your wall.

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) was born to a farming family in Gruchy, on the Normandy coast, and worked the land himself before studying art in Cherbourg and then Paris, in the studio of Paul Delaroche. In 1849 he settled in Barbizon, at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he became a founding figure of the school of painters gathered there. His monumental treatments of rural labor — The Sower, The Gleaners, The Angelus — gave peasant subjects a gravity that critics of the 1850s read, often with alarm, as socially subversive.

Shepherding was among his most persistent themes, returned to in canvases such as The Keeper of the Flock (1871–74) and The Little Shepherdess, while In the Auvergne reflects the hilly countryside he studied during stays there in the 1860s. Landscape came to dominate his late work, and his example proved formative for Vincent van Gogh.