Painting Analysis Jean-Francois Millet: \'Priory

Painting Analysis

Jean-Francois Millet: 'Priory at Vauville, Normandy'

The French painter Jean-Francois Millet (1814-75) was a noted example of the realist school of painting. He began as a portrait painter, but made his reputation with paintings of scenes of peasant life in the French countryside, such as 'The Sower' (1850), 'Harvesters Resting' (1853) and 'The Gleaners' (1857). These works were powerful, naturalistic depictions of peasant life that gave an epic character to lives of poverty and toil. At a time of social and political unrest in Europe these works were also seen by some as having a humanitarian social agenda to do with the shortcomings of the current economic system in France. During the last years of his life Millet, while still painting peasant subjects, spent more and more time on landscape paintings. It is from the very end of his life that this painting, 'Priory at Vauville, Normandy', dates. The town of Vauville is in western Normandy, on the coast. There is a chateau with a famous garden there, and a priory dating back to medieval times, known as the Priory of Saint-Hermel. Millet worked on his painting of the priory between 1872 and 1874, during his association with the informal 'Barbizon School' of naturalistic landscape painters.

The painting is in oil paint on stretched canvas, attached to a wooden frame. It is a large object, about three feet tall by four feet wide (although compared to many other paintings it is perhaps on the small side overall) and its format is thus a deep rectangle. It shows a scene of stone buildings in rural setting, by the sea - the sea is visible beyond the buildings. The canvas is divided by the line of the horizon, about two-thirds of the way up; below this line is land and sea, above it is sky. The horizon line is broken by the buildings of the Priory which rise in the upper center of the canvas. The Priory itself is on a hill above the sea, but Millet has depicted it from a low viewpoint, so that it seems to blend with the earth that fills the bottom half of the picture. That surface of earth is a rough, stony, broken lane, rutted and scarred, fringed by rough tufts of grass. The lane leads to a gate which is on the vertical centerline of the canvas and slightly to the right of the central point of the picture. Again, the low viewpoint emphasizes the way this gateway and the lane leading to it are sunk into the earth, with the priory rising above. The light appears to be coming from the left, falling on the faces of the buildings and casting a shadow in the foreground; it seems to be the fairly weak sunlight of a late autumn afternoon. Certainly the scene is not a brightly sunlit one but gives a feeling of wind and exposure - typical, perhaps, of such a coastal location. The overall impression is of a spacious landscape, but the contorted shape of the lane in the foreground, the sunken gate and the blank faces of the buildings imply enclosure and containment rather than openness.

The piece is painted in oils, and the paint is roughly textured and laid on the canvas with energy rather than care and precision. Bold strokes of paint make up the rutted path and the rough stone walls of the priory, while a thinner wash is used for the sea and the sky, creating a contrast in texture appropriate for the different things being represented. The rough naturalism of Millet's style is appropriate to this bold technique. The colors used are also quite unrefined in some ways - earthy browns and greens, the rough grey of the walls. The overall impression is of robustness, clarity, and impressionistic vigor.

The composition is based upon the creation of visual masses rather than the use of line. The central point of the composition is the far gable end of the Priory chapel, with its belfry; the other masses depicted - the landscape and the walls and structures - rise to this point, carrying the observer's eye up to this focal point. The chapel is also the most brightly lit structure in the scene, emphasizing its centrality to the composition and to the painter's vision. It is above the eye-line of the observer, standing against sea and sky as an objective to be reached, once the rough ground of the foreground is crossed and the gate opened. Through the gate some cows are coming, and a human figure - perhaps a woman peasant or farmworker - is holding the gate open to let them through. There are other figures on the left side of the canvas: a labourer sitting against the verge of the lane, perhaps taking a rest after a day's work in the fields, and two more human figures beyond the ridge, against the background of the sea. These figures are all small and incidental, however. They are not the main topic of the painting and the picture does not set out to tell their stories. The subject of the painting is the natural landscape, the buildings, and the quality of light and atmosphere at a particular time, and these qualities dominate.

This painting is a representational work of art. It is a landscape - a representation, from the artist's experience and perceptions, of a particular scene at a particular place. The painting shows the Priory buildings in their setting of land, sea and sky, with colour and form used to represent the component parts of the scene. The picture is not just representational, however - it does more than simply show what is there in the way that a technical drawing or architectural diagram might. It is a work of art and the artistic sensibility is at work through this picture. The quality of light and air, the sun on the stone of the buildings and on the mud of the ground, are used to convey a mood in an impressionistic way, as well as to represent the scene. Abstract ideas can be said to be present. The Priory buildings, built of stone and rooted in the landscape, seeming almost to grow from the earth, can be said to convey the notion of a timeless, genuine, well-rooted culture of the French countryside, in contrast to the shifting character and superficiality of the city. The buildings are as true and as solid as the earth that dominates the foreground of the picture, and which the observer is invited to imagine beneath his feet. The structure also aspires to something beyond the earthly however. As mentioned above, the chapel forms the focal point of the picture, elevated above the ground and sea, raised into the sky. This can be seen as a reference to the religious purpose of the building and the virtue present in such ancient testimonies of faith.

There is no direct narrative in this picture, in the sense of a story, or a scene that is identifiably part of a story, being depicted. The painting is basically representational and impressionistic. But it could be argued that a larger story is present in this picture, the story of the enduring value of faith and the rootedness of genuine values in the soil of the countryside and in the honest labor of the rural peasantry. This is characteristic of Millet's elevation of the peasant life to the level of heroic struggle and epic achievement, and his celebration of rural values as opposed to those of the city. Religious faith was, for Millet, an intrinsic part of his view of peasant values, as is shown by his celebrated work of 1859, 'The Angelus', in which a peasant couple, called to prayer by the bell of a distant chapel, stand in silent prayer in the fields in which they are working. The chapel in that painting is similar to the priory chapel in the work we are looking at here; it sits upon the ground, which is the place of hard toil and of earthly fruitfulness, but links it to the heavens, the place of reward for labour and divine bounty. The Priory here stands like a monument between land and sea and between earth and heaven, enduring and solid.

Although this painting is characterized by vigorous impressionistic technique and a rough immediacy of effect, Millet worked on it for two years, and based his work on many preparatory sketches and drawings, as he did with all his works. The resulting painting is a carefully considered piece of work, calculated and shaped according to the artist's view of his work, its value, its message, and its audience. By the time Millet painted this picture he was an established and successful artist who could expect his work to be exhibited, to be commented upon favorably by press and critics, and to sell for good sums of money. By working in an established genre of landscape painting, and by using it to convey the themes for which he was already well-known and recognized - peasant life, rural virtue, religious values, a sense of history and tradition - he was sure of finding an appreciative public. His work can be seen as fitting into a wider context of artists working to represent the France their generally well-off and comfortably middle-class and upper-class purchasers wanted to see and to believe in. The purchasers of Millet's works may never have visited the Normandy countryside for themselves, but they could share in its beauty and its spiritual and moral values through Millet's art and the art of other painters like him. The fact that, rather than being dominated by perhaps unappealing figures of the poor and exploited peasantry this picture depicts an apparently attractive and straightforward landscape can only have increased its appeal, in contrast perhaps to some of Millet's earlier work in which the human figures of the workers dominate.