How are you?
Currently, I am
introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the
title “Interesting
Art Stories”.
The 65th story is “The Angelus” by Jean-François Millet.
“The Angelus” is an oil
painting by French painter Jean-François Millet, completed between 1857 and
1859.
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| Self-Portrait, Jean-François Millet (c. 1840 ~1841) |
The painting depicts two peasants
praying with the ringing of the church bell signaling the end of a day’s work
after harvesting potatoes in the fields of Barbizon with a view of the church
tower of Chailly-en-Bière.
On the ground they are standing is
a small basket of potatoes, and around them a cart and a pitchfork. The
relationship between the two peasants in the painting has been interpreted in
various ways, such as colleagues at work, husband and wife, or farmer and
maidservant.
Millet said “The idea for this
painting came from my memory that as a child, when I was working in the fields,
my grandmother always stopped me what I was working to pray for the poor when
she heard the church bells ringing,”
Millet sold this painting after he
sold his “The Gleaners” at the Salon in 1857. About half the size of “The
Gleaners,” the painting was sold for less than half the price of “The Gleaners”
and exhibited in Brussels in 1874, a year before Millet's death.
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| The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet (1857) |
Initially, the painting was
interpreted as a political sense, and Millet was considered a socialist in
solidarity with the workers. Although this painting was one of the popular
religious paintings hung as replicas in many homes throughout France, Millet
painted it with a sense of nostalgia rather than religious feeling.
Much later, Salvador Dalí said that
he was terrified when he saw a replica of this painting in his childhood school
and that the basket felt like a child's coffin and the woman felt like a
praying mantis.
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| Salvador Dalí |
Dali also insisted that the painting was not a prayer ritual, but a funeral scene in which the couple are mourning over their dead baby. Although this claim did not get much public response, following his insistence, the Louvre took an X-ray of the painting, and they found surprising results that there was a small geometric object similar to a coffin by the basket.
Based on these results, it seems possible that
Millet originally painted a burial similar to Courbet's "A Burial at
Ornans (1850)", but later changed it to a prayer scene by adding a church
bell tower.
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| A Burial At Ornans, Gustave Courbet (1850) |
Dali was inspired by this painting when he created paintings related to paranoiac-critical method, “The Architectural Angelus of Millet” and “Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses” in 1933.
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The Architectural Angelus of Millet, Salvador Dali (1933) |
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| Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses, Salvador Dali (1933) |
Also two years after
creating these paintings, Dali painted two additional paintings, “The Angelus
of Gala” and “Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus”, which included
a partial reproduction of Millet's “The Angelus.”
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| The Angelus of Gala, Salvador Dali (1935) |
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| Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, Salvador Dali (1935) |
Thank you.
