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Jean-Francois Millet

Jean-Francois Millet was well-known for his paintings of the peasants and the rural landscape. His interest in creating rural imagery stemmed from his childhood memories of his rural life in Normandy. Thus, Millet possessed a personal and intimate knowledge of the way of life and points of view of the peasants. Millet was also likely to have been inspired by his arrival at the rural community of Barbizon that was replete with images of the peasants and rural activity. Combined with the memories of his childhood, Millet's life in Barbizon further cemented his interest in the rural themes and provided him with the inspiration to develop his style of portraying the rural landscapes (Laughton 76, 78; Eiland, Pelletier and Phagan). Furthermore, his attraction to the harsh lives of the gleaners--the most impoverished peasants whose livelihoods depended on salvaging the leftover grains on the groundùsuited his pessimistic conception of the challenging nature of life (Hedberg 16).

Millet's initial interest in the rural images certainly deepened as he began to learn more about the social and economic difficulties of the impoverished peasants he was portraying. The socio-economic upheavals of his times that affected the rural community with the establishment of large-scale commercialized enterprises magnified the hardships of the peasants. Many of the peasants who became unemployed were the focus of Millet's paintings. Even though Millet did not intend to make a social statement with his paintings, his choice of the subject matter certainly thrust the poverty of the peasants into the public's consciousness (Murphy et al.; Shallcross and Albano 35). Therefore, Millet's choice of the peasant as his subject-matter could be considered to be a dynamic interaction between his past (the memories of his childhood) and his present (his fascination and concern for the plight of the impoverished in the rural community) (Herbert 10).

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Jean-Francois Millet. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:24, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1687799.html