Open-Air Museum
Barbizon
Plaine de l'Angelus - Site de la peinture
The exact field where Millet stood when painting his famous L'Angelus. Chailly church steeple visible on the horizon, just as in the painting.
Description
This open plain northwest of Barbizon is the actual field depicted in Jean-Francois Millet's L'Angelus, painted between 1857 and 1859. Standing here, the steeple of Chailly-en-Biere church is visible on the horizon - precisely as Millet painted it. The two peasants pausing over their potato harvest to pray were observed here, in this plain, by a painter who lived just a few hundred metres away on the Grande Rue. The painting now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. A mosaic reproduction of the work marks this spot as part of the Parcours des Mosaiques.
Historical context
Millet painted this plain every season for twenty-six years. He knew its light at every hour, its mud in winter, its dust in summer, its strange flatness that makes the church steeple of Chailly feel impossibly close and impossibly far at the same time. L'Angelus was not a religious statement - Millet said himself it came from a childhood memory of his grandmother stopping work when the bell rang. But standing here at dusk, with the same steeple on the same horizon, it becomes something larger than biography. The plain has not changed much. The bell still rings.
Historical research: grappilles.fr — Barbizon Histoire et Patrimoine
Related places
Additional locations in the Open-Air Museum group.
Nearby
Within reach on foot—village lanes and forest edge.
Heritage Site
134 m
Monument des Freres Farman
Monument commemorating Henri Farman and the Voisin brothers, pioneers of aviation who used the Plaine de l'Angelus as a landing field.
Bus Stop
169 m
Arret Bus -- 3 Poiriers
Bus stop at 3 Poiriers, north of the village near the plains.
Museum
377 m
Auberge Ganne
The historic inn where Barbizon School painters gathered in the 19th century.