One Fine Show: “Millet, Life on the Land” at The National Gallery in London

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

These days, it feels like everyone I know professes to crave the outdoors. They are all so tired of the city—its comforts, its culture, its style, its enlightenments, its people, its opportunities. Though they call an Uber when the walk is greater than 10 blocks, they profess to want to hike the Catskills, the Dolomites, the Alps. They tell me they will raise chickens at their rustic getaway home, even though I’m pretty sure they cannot cook an egg.

One of the reasons I enjoy the work of Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) is that he engages in none of this romanticism about areas defined by vegetation and dirt. “Millet: Life on the Land,” a new show at London’s National Gallery that coincides with the 150th anniversary of the French artist’s death, brings together 15 paintings and drawings. It’s a smaller show but packs a punch.

Millet was less interested in the landscapes than he was in the people who worked them. This is best demonstrated by the painting at the heart of this exhibition, L’Angélus (1857-9) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. In it, two workers bow their heads to say the prayer in the title at the end of a long day in the field. Until re-examining it for this column, I hadn’t remembered that the 6 p.m. sun actually isn’t visible in the work itself, it’s just outside the canvas. This speaks to the way it infuses every other aspect of the work, from the perfect clouds down to the bales of hay, the humble outfits of the workers, and the curiously curved pitchfork. What a benediction indeed.

Other standouts in the show include The Winnower (1847-8), which shows a shadow-faced man shaking wheat from his basket. Most of the works in this exhibition, however, come from after 1849, when Millet left Paris for the village of Barbizon. This town in the Fontainebleau Forest would lend its name to a school of painting he founded that strove to capture the honest work of the land. Another great one for me is The Milkmaid (c. 1853), in which a woman with an ingenious carrying contraption walks home boldly through rough terrain.

I would compare this show to the recent exhibition “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Friedrich saw God in nature, and when he put human figures in his painting, they were rendered humble by it. Millet’s attitude was no less sentimental, grandiose, or spiritual, but more concerned with human dignity. With all due respect to Friedrich and my friends scaling the Pyrenees, I think we could all do with a little more realism these days. Until then, there’s always the upstate SoHo House.

“Millet: Life on the Land” is on view at The National Gallery in London through October 19, 2025. 

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