Millet: Life on the Land at the National Gallery

The first UK exhibition in nearly 50 years dedicated to Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) will open at the National Gallery in autumn 2025.

The show will coincide with the 150th anniversary of Millet’s death – by which time his works were well known in the UK and beginning to be eagerly collected by an enthusiastic group of British collectors, resulting in a significant body of his work in UK public collections.

Millet: Life on the Land will present around 13 paintings and drawings from British public collections. It will include the National Gallery’s The Winnower (about 1847‒8), and the exceptional loan of L’Angelus (1857‒9) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The exhibition will range from Millet’s last years in Paris through to his images of workers on the land during the 1850s following his move to the village of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau Forest in 1849, when he became one of the most significant painters associated with the 19th-century Barbizon school*. Two drawings of shepherdesses from the Cooper Gallery (Barnsley) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) will be shown together for the first time.

The Winnower, which was acquired by the National Gallery in 1978, is one of Millet’s first paintings to treat the theme of rural labour. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1848 and was well received. However, later works exhibited at the Paris Salon produced extreme reaction. While Millet’s own political convictions are unclear, many critics appropriated his work for their own progressive agenda while others labelled him as subversive. Yet there is no doubt that he had sympathy with the workers around him and wrote in 1851 of the ‘human side’ that touched him most.

In L’Angelus, a man and a woman are reciting the Angelus, a prayer which commemorates the annunciation made to Mary by the angel Gabriel. It is traditionally cited at morning, noon and evening, when it marks the end of the working day.  Never collected by its original commissioner, it followed an extraordinary journey through several collections and sales. The two quiet figures silhouetted against land and sky, the profound sense of meditation underscored by a beauty of light have turned it into a world-famous icon in the 20th century.

Sarah Herring, Associate Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, says ‘Millet endowed rural labourers with dignity and nobility, depicting them in drawings and paintings with empathy and compassion.’