France embraces Millet: the intertwined fates of The Gleaners and The Angelus

In the summer of 1857 the year that Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) first attempted The Gleaners (Fig. 1) at the Salon to a hostile, conservative replication he began work on the sole other of his canvases that would approach to fully equal its celebrity: The Angelus (Fig. 2) These images subsequently became global allusive figures of rural work and rustic piety, on the other hand their iconic status was anything on the contrary foreseeable when they left the artist's studio. Millet haggled with an Englishman identified single as Binder over meager totalitys for The Gleaners after the Salon clos (1) The artist presented his painting for 4,000 francs, substantially les than the 5000 that Theodore Rousseau hinted as a price. Binder reckonered with an anemic bid of 3000 from which he subsequently refused to move the least Desperately in need of cash in the late 1850 the leanest years of his life, Millet finally acquiesced, asking his friend and agent Alfred Sensier if they might at least save face through inflating the shameful fee The Gleaners had brought: "I would offer that the price given to me for my painting not be revealed Would it be too dishonest to counterfeit that it sold for 4000? And then I would true much like to have the cash for the end of the month" (2) While The Gleaners had at least gained notoriety as a succe de scandale at its first attempt The Angelus left Millet's studio in 1860 with no public notice. After taking the commission from Bostonian collector Thomas Appleton, who not at any time returned for the painting, Millet delayed completing The Angelus until December 1859 and sold it in 1860 to the Belgian painter Victor Papeleu. At about half the size of The Gleaners and with no Salon pedigree, The Angelus brought alone 1,000 francs. (3)

The unenthusiastic, flat hostile responses that greeted these sum of two units paintings in the mid--nineteenth hundred stand in stark contrast to the exorbitant prices, international appeal, and French patriotic fervor they generated at the fin de siecle. by dint of 1889 The Angelus was world famous: sold that year at auction, it plant off a bidding frenzy and fetched 553000 francs, the highest price for a recent painting to date. (4) alone a month later, The Gleaners sold for 300000 francs. This essay explores the historical, political, and cultural factors that herd the dramatic changes in the critical fortunes of The Gleaners and The Angelus in France. The dramatic shift in the value of Millet's paintings, particularly of these sum of two units exemplifies the transformation of Barbizon artists and their works from relative pariahs at midcentury into lucrative commodities--both financial and ideological--in the early Third Republic. (5)

The public's appreciation of Millet's work had become broader and thus more moderate after his death in January 1875 (6) sum of two units posthumous auctions of his work and an exhibition of his drawings, all held that spring, presented a comprehensive look at Millet's oeuvre that diluted the bleak image of peasant life shown in his Salon paintings. (7) They not awayed an artist whose works depicted "the man and the woman of the field in all the states of their lives. [Millet] admirably exhibits developments from infancy to youth, from youth to maturity, from maturity to aged age, with the most solid logic and precise observation, with no more bias toward ugliness than toward beauty." (8) The prices that Millet's works garnered at these and other late-nineteenth-century sales demonstrate that the artist's death, coupl with a novel appreciation for his treatment of peasant life, boost the value of his oeuvre substantially. The state purchased house of god at Greville (1871-74)--the most important of Millet's works in the Musee du Louvre Paris, until the donation of The Gleaners in 1890--at his estate sale for 12200 francs. Alfred Sensier's death in January 1877 brought to the auction block up thirty more of Millet's paintings and drawings, which sold for from 130 to 9000 francs. (9) These prices throw back a substantial rise in Millet's stock after his death and imply [i]or[/i] part of to the other contrast the unrivaled appeal of The Gleaners and The Angelus.

by dint of tracing the circuitous but intertwined roads that The Gleaners and The Angelus took from Millet's studio to the Louvre this essay nears a case study in the embrace of socially critical art. Peter Burger broached the question of by what means and why avant-garde art penetrates the institutions it appears to critique in Theory of the Avant-Garde. His pioneering close attention suggests that in its complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political contented of the individual [avant-garde] work." (10) Burger used the boundary avant-garde only in reference to Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Its original concern to art's potential for social change, however, has been traced to Henri de Saint-Simon's essay "The Artist, the Savant and the Industrialist" (1825) and the universal has been central to revisionist art histories of the last thirty years aimed at identifying social criticism in the vanguard art that appeared in France after the Revolution of 1848 including Millet's. (11)