Jean-François Millet – an artist who moved the market

An Irishman’s Diary about a great painter

As grateful artists everywhere will know, today is the 200th birthday of Jean-François Millet, a painter whose influence on subsequent generations went well beyond mere brushstrokes.

Millet is best known for his pictures of French peasant life, including The Gleaners (1857), which depicts the hardship of three poor women, handpicking leftover grain in a field after the harvest.

But Millet was himself a farmer’s son, who had a long struggle for acceptance by the art world, living much of his life in poverty. And although his later years were comfortable, his death in 1875 left a large family with no financial security.

So when another of his peasant paintings, The Angelus (1858), sold a few years later for a staggering multiple of what it had earned him, it became something of a scandal.

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An indirect result, eventually, was the French droit de suite law, guaranteeing a share of resale value to artists and their families. And that law is still spreading its influence today, having helped inform a 2001 European directive, now binding here too.

No doubt Irish artists will want to express their gratitude in some way today. Unfortunately, they can't visit the National Gallery of Ireland's only Millet, Country Scene with Stile (circa 1872), which is not on show at the moment.

But I suggest that if they hear a bell anywhere, at noon or 6pm, they might pause for a moment and gaze reflectively into the distance, as in the RTÉ video, while giving thanks for Millet and his most influential work.

Studying The Angelus in the Musée d'Orsay a while ago, I was reminded of something Graham Robb wrote is his 2008 book, The Discovery of France. He was talking about how, in a vast, agricultural country, local identity was once dictated less by any lines on maps than by which church bell you could hear. Those within clear range of the same bell were also likely to have "the same customs and language, the same memories and fears, and the same local saint". Only further out in the circle, where the sonic ripples of one bell collided with those of another, might identities be confused.

But then, spoiling the effect slightly, I learned that the steeple on the horizon of Millet’s picture was only added as a second thought.

The painting's first version, as commissioned by an American buyer, was called Praying Over the Potatoes – perhaps a deliberate reference to the 1840s blight, which struck mainland Europe too. Only when the client failed to collect the work did Millet retouch and rename it.

Salvador Dalí, who was fascinated by the picture, thought there was another layer of meaning still. He sensed a darker theme, one of repressed sexuality, and believed the couple were actually praying over a child’s grave – a belief partly supported by X-rays of the canvas, which suggest that Millet did experiment with that theme.

It's a bit of an irony that, for a famously uncommercial painter, Millet was to feature posthumously in more than his share of art market controversies. The inflated resale of The Angelus was itself an offshoot of another market crisis, after its then owner, a Monsieur Secretan, had been part of a "copper ring" attempting to corner the global supply of that commodity.

The plot misfired, forcing Secretan to offload his art collection to cover the losses. But being a generally canny businessman, he organised the sale to coincide with the World Expo of 1889, when many rich foreigners descended on Paris. As a result, art prices shot up like the escalators of the newly built Eiffel Tower.

Forty years later, perhaps underlining the need for a droit de suite, a young man called Jean-Charles Millet was convicted of selling forged pictures as the work of his famous grandfather. One of his mistakes, apparently, was to sign some canvases at the top, rather than the bottom.

Which sounds like the sort of detail Mark Twain might have invented for his play Is He Dead? – a comic farce inspired by Millet's impoverished early years. It centres on a plot whereby a stage Irishman, Phelim O'Shaughnessy, and two other friends of the artist plot to fake Millet's death, thereby inflating his market value.

The play is not one of Twain’s better works of art, I gather. Indeed, it had to wait more than a century for its debut production, in 2007. But it may have been justifiable as an excuse for one deathless pun alone –wherein the plotters, snaring another would-be Millet collector, declare their intention to “take him to The Gleaners”.

@FrankmcnallyIT