Interesting Art Stories: 65. The Angelus, Jean-François Millet, ACJ Art Academy

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Thank you.

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