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Overview
Born into a prosperous French peasant family, Jean-François Millet (1814-75) enjoyed a good education before being apprenticed to a painter in Cherbourg in 1833. In 1837 he was sent to Paris, and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as the pupil of the famous history painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). Dissatisfied with academic painting, Millet developed his own style, focusing on countryside scenes and rural labourers. Millet's art was rooted in the Normandy of his childhood and he emerged, alongside his noisier contemporary Gustave Courbet, as one of the principal artists of mid-19th century realism. Although he was associated with the Barbizon School painters, he concentrated more on figures than landscape painting. His rural scenes are often classically composed and bathed in a nostalgic golden light. Despite his often idealised view of the peasantry, Millet's pictures contain a wealth of realistic detail.
Man with a wheelbarrow is an etching that derives from his oil painting of the same theme (1848-52) in the Indianopolis Museum of Art, USA. However, there are important modifications, such as the removal of the gate on the right of the painting. Still more significant, Millet makes his farm worker look significantly older (though we can only see him from behind) and more slouched over his barrow. In both instances, however, Millet takes a single peasant farmer with simple clothes and tools, and transforms him into a symbol of the dignity of manual labor. The peasant is idealised, bathed in a golden light in the painting, and transmuted into an what is perhaps the emblem of a vanishing - certainly threatened - way of life. Millet found the nobility of the peasants, with their lives grounded in the soil, a welcome change from the instability of modern life.
The unglamorous reality of this noble peasant is made explicit when we note its French title: Le paysan rentrant du fumier. 'Fumier' means manure-heap. There are two impressions of this etching in Te Papa's collection, the other acquired in 1976 (1976-0005-2).
See:
National Galleries of Scotland, 'Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/jean-francois-millet
Wikipedia, 'Peasant with a wheelbarrow', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant_with_a_Wheelbarrow
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2018