Jean-François Millet

Jean-François Millet grew up working the land in Normandy, the son of farmers, before a stipend from local patrons sent him to Paris in 1837 to study painting properly. That background set him apart from most Salon painters of his generation, who painted peasants as a distant, sentimental subject. Millet had actually done the work.

In 1857 he exhibited The Gleaners, showing three peasant women bent over a field collecting the wheat left behind after the main harvest, the poorest labor available to rural women at the time. Critics saw a political statement in it, a reminder of the class divide, and reacted with more hostility than Millet had intended. Two years later he painted a couple pausing in a field at dusk for the evening prayer, and changed its title from Prayer for the Potato Crop to The Angelus, the name it's known by today.

By then Millet had settled in the village of Barbizon, on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, among a group of painters who worked directly from the surrounding landscape rather than in a Paris studio. He stayed there until his death in 1875.