From August 7 to October 19, 2025, the Nationwide Gallery in London presents the exhibition “Millet: Life on the Land”
Supply: Nationwide Gallery · Picture: Jean-François Millet, L’Angélus, 1857-59, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
The present coincides with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Millet’s dying – by which period his works have been well-known within the UK and starting to be eagerly collected by an enthusiastic group of British collectors, leading to a major physique of his work in UK public collections.
Millet: Life on the Land presents round 13 work and drawings from British public collections. It would embrace the Nationwide Gallery’s The Winnower (about 1847‒8), and the distinctive mortgage of ‘L’Angelus‘ (1857‒9) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
The exhibition ranges from Millet’s final years in Paris by to his pictures of employees on the land throughout the 1850s following his transfer to the village of Barbizon within the Fontainebleau Forest in 1849, when he grew to become one of the vital important painters related to the Nineteenth-century Barbizon college. Two drawings of shepherdesses from the Cooper Gallery (Barnsley) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) shall be proven collectively for the primary time.
In ‘L’Angelus’, a person and a lady are reciting the Angelus, a prayer which commemorates the annunciation made to Mary by the angel Gabriel. It’s historically cited at morning, midday and night, when it marks the top of the working day. By no means collected by its authentic commissioner, it adopted a unprecedented journey by a number of collections and gross sales. The 2 quiet figures silhouetted in opposition to land and sky, the profound sense of meditation underscored by a magnificence of sunshine have turned it right into a world-famous icon within the twentieth century.
Sarah Herring, Affiliate Curator of Publish 1800 Work, says ‘Millet endowed rural labourers with dignity and nobility, depicting them in drawings and paintings with empathy and compassion.’
