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JEAN MILLET
The Walk to Work/ Le Depart pour le Travail (1851)
oil on canvas, 55.5cm X 46cm/21 7/8 in X 18 1/8 in

Influenced by Poussin. Michel-angelo. Dutch seventeenth century painters, and French eighteenth century art. Millet immortalized the agricultural worker brought to the fore by the Revolution in 1848. Although a well-read and educated man, Millet's Realist subject matter reflects his peasant origins. His subjects in-cluded the labors of the field, times of day and seasons and, generally, the unending toil of the laborer on the land.

Millet worked from memory, studies from life, and models posed in the studio. He was not an out-of-doors painter, and his is the cool light of the studio with its warm. contrasting shadows. Often employing the earth colors, Millet's paint surfaces echo the soil which he painted. His heavily worked shadows and lights are in the tradition typified by the eighteenth century French still-life and genre painter Chardin. Late works exploit brightly tinted grounds giving an effect of colored light.

The paint quality is stiff and impasted in the highlights, thin and fluid in the middle tones and shadows - a traditional method, although elsewhere. Millet's shadows are unconven-tional in the heavy use of impasto. There is an { active dialogue between the paint layer and ground in the darks and middle tones; impasted areas oblit-erate the ground but maintain the brilliance of pale areas which, over a dark ground, would sink with time. Modelling of flesh is handled with simple contrasts of light and shade with most of the middle tones suppressed. Millet's crusty paint surfaces were enlivened by dragging stiff, dryish color across dry paint on textured canvas, creating a characteristic stippled, broken effect.

Millet's graphic techniques were compar-able to his oil techniques in their power to evoke texture and light. His large pastels in particular were built up with a web of pale powdery color strengthened by firm. fluent outlines of skilled draftsmanship, which are alsoseen in his paintings.

His handling of water in oil paint exploits the transparency and opacity of the pigments to imitate natural effects. Thus, the trans-parency of water in the shade of dark reflections is rendered with fluid, thin, transparent browns over a pale ground, while the surface reflec-tions of sky and light are represented by opaque, broken whites and blues.

The Walk to Work is typical of Millet's treatment of light in the stiff impasto and contrasting use of thin, transparent passages which reveal the pale ground beneath. The light comes from two conflicting sources, the back and side. Millet used a chiaroscuro technique in the manner of Dutch and Flemish painters to create this dramatic lighting. The brushwork is graphic and descriptive, evoking forms and textures. Millet used a limited, subdued palette dominated by earth colors, black and white. A mixed blue-green recurs throughout Millet's work, and an iron oxide red is used to add warmth.

The Gooseherdess is another painting in which Millet exploited contrasts between loaded impasto in the lights and thin transparent films in the shadows. The contrast is here used effectively to imitate the natural appearance of water with its transparent depths and reflected opaque lights; it makes an interesting comparison with Monet's entirely opaque handling which also creates a remarkable illusion of water.

In Millet's confident, draftsmanly execution, the brushstrokes follow the form of the clogs, while the man's legs are sculpted in strong contrasts of light and shade concentrating upon the muscular form beneath the barely indicated trousers. Further working might have built up the texture of fabric on the underlying form. Thin transparent darks reveal the white of the ground and the texture of canvas, and thin opaque scumbles separate the background from the figures.

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