Maison de Millet

Historical context

Jean-Francois Millet arrived in Barbizon in 1849, fleeing a cholera epidemic in Paris and the turbulence of the Second Republic. He had intended to stay a few months. He stayed until his death in 1875 -- twenty-six years in the same house on the Grande Rue, the same studio with its north-facing window, the same view of the fields that would become the backdrop for the most reproduced paintings of the nineteenth century. The house was modest, even by Barbizon standards. Millet was chronically poor -- a letter preserved in the municipal archive records that at the time of his death, his baker's bill in Chailly had been running unpaid for twelve years, amounting to twenty-two thousand francs. His butcher was owed twenty-four thousand more. The debts were eventually settled by a collector who bought a Corot on condition the money go first to Millet's creditors. Millet himself received nothing. And yet from this cramped studio, with its accumulation of sketches pinned to the walls and the smell of linseed oil in the plaster, came L'Angelus, Les Glaneuses, Le Semeur -- images that became, in the decades after his death, among the most widely reproduced artworks in the world. Van Gogh copied Les Glaneuses obsessively. Dali claimed L'Angelus concealed a buried child. The Musee d'Orsay acquired both. Millet never worked from life -- he sketched outdoors in the fields around Barbizon and Chailly, then translated those studies into paint in the studio. The atelier you visit today is where those translations happened: a room full of objects, drawings, and the quiet light of a north window. Adele Marier, a Chailly woman born in 1839, was among his models -- her face, some historians believe, became the woman in L'Angelus, head bowed over the turned earth.

Historical research: grappilles.fr — Barbizon Histoire et Patrimoine