Millet, Jean François (1814-1875), French genre and landscape painter, born in Gruchy. The son of a Normandy peasant, he received his first art training in Cherbourg. A civic scholarship enabled him to go to Paris and work in the studio of the history painter P. Delaroche from 1837 to 1839. Subsequently he scraped a living together by selling portraits and pictures of gallant scenes in the Rococo manner. Between 1841 and 1845 he lived in Cherbourg, a town he often returned to later in life. Here, and also in Le Havre, he produced his few seascapes. In 1849 he joined the Barbizon school and lived in relative poverty at Barbizon, where he had the companionship of Troyon, Diaz, Dupré and Rousseau. In the early 1850s he found his true métier, the depiction of peasant life.

His best-known pictures date from this period, including "The Sower" (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1850), which brought him success at the Salon in 1851; "The Binders" (Paris, LOuvre, 1850), "The Gleaners" and "The Angelus" or "Evening Prayer" and Potato Planters (1862, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts). In these works he depicted the hardships of peasant life, but not in the rational and unemotional manner of Courbet. Rather, he endows the frugal existence of these people with an almost religious solemnity created by a twilight atmosphere cast over their large figures.

"True humanity full of great poetry" is revealed in the plight of the peasants. In 1867 Millet received a prize at the Paris World Exhibition, but generally he found little recognition. His social conscience made him suspect, and also his works were often considered sentimental. But nevertheless they exercised great influence worldwide in the development of Realism, and particular on the works of Pissarro and Van Gogh. At an auction in 1889 his "The Angelus" fetched the sensational sum of 553000 francs.