Millet, Jean Francois

Drawn into the Light: Jean Francois Millet

The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-francois Millet

In The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy, David Middleton celebrates the artist Jean-François Millet's sympathetic realism depicting the harsh life of French peasants in the nineteenth century and honoring their essential human dignity. Millet referred to some of his drawings as Epopée des champs, "the epic of the fields." Here, Middleton follows Millet, picture by picture, in taking a lowly pastoral theme and elevating it to epic and tragedy. Middleton seeks to describe Gruchy—the small Norman village near Cherbourg where Millet grew up—and explore that rural world in relation to the American South and his own career as a Louisiana poet. A deep affirmation of the agrarian way of life, Middleton's poems are an implicit critique of the postagrarian world entering its final stages of decay.

Reading The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy is like walking through a series of galleries of paintings, each poem a translation from one art form to the other.

The painting is unfinished, rightly so, For it depicts what never has an end: A fat hog on her haunches pushed and drawn Out of the barn to this small walled-in place,

Two men pulling a rope tied round the snout, And a woman coaxing, showing the beast A bucket's tilted lip of slop and corn, November's emblem, bleak with our bleak need.

The hog has caught the scent of other hogs On the butcher's stained apron and she squeals So near the slaughter-board, the primal scene, The long knife and the basin for the blood.

Huddled and wrapped against a wall and cold, Two ghostly children—charcoal, not pastel— Appalled yet famished, fix on death and ham, This open abattoir, hunger's great I AM. —"Killing the Hog, ca. 1867-70"

Jean Francois Millet (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press)

Estelle May Hurll (1863-1924) was the author of The Madonna in Art (1898), Raphael (1899), Jean François Millet (1900), Michelangelo (1900), Correggio (1901), Child-Life in Art (1901), The Bible Beautiful (1908), Sir Joshua Reynolds, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Tuscan Sculpture of the Fifteenth Century. "In making a selection of Millet's pictures, devoted as they are to the single theme of French peasant life, variety of subject can be obtained only by showing as many phases of that life as possible. Our illustrations therefore represent both men and women working separately in the tasks peculiar to each, and working together in the labors shared between them. There are in addition a few pictures of child life. "

Jean-Francois Millet: [exhibition], Hayward Gallery, 22 January-7 March 1976

Jean-Francois Millet

The Drawings of Daumier and Millet

Jean Francois Millet: A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the Painter with Introduction and Interpretation

Text block pristine, pages tight to spine - Text in English. 96 page monograph

Jean-Francois Millet, Peasant And Painter

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.

Jean-François Millet [Au-delà de l'Angélus]

Millet, Van Gogh: Paris, Musee d'Orsay : 14 septembre 1998-3 janvier 1999