The mystery of Millet’s religious masterpiece

The picture changed hands nine times before the US got hold of it in 1889, for a stupendous sum, prompting a French department store owner to snatch it back for even more money the following year. He bequeathed it to the nation, and at least part of its hyperbolic history surely relates to patriotic zeal.

The Industrial Revolution had caused a steady exodus of peasants from French farms in to the city during Millet’s lifetime (1814-75). His images of rural labourers alarmed the Paris bourgeoisie, with conservative critics attacking him as a socialist agitator; yet he was equally reproved by artists and critics on the left, not least for his perceived Catholicism. What did the artist really believe? Why were his peasants so faceless? Was he a true republican? Millet’s art was treated as propaganda.

What he actually painted, and drew, can be seen at the National Gallery in a show centring on The Angelus, loaned by France to Britain for the first time in almost 50 years. How small it is, and how sonorous. The two figures are stock-still, heads bent in prayer, bodies haloed by golden evening rays. Shadows lengthen over the spreading fields. Unearthed potatoes lie barely visible around their clogged feet and a blue spire rises on the far horizon beneath high pink clouds. What you see is also what you hear: the radiating music of bells.

Stand before Millet’s masterpiece and the sense is of time pausing too, of a meditative slowness. The couple before you are rounded and gentle, solid forms softened by the twilight. The man’s hair still bears the impress of the hat in his hands; the woman’s apron catches the light as she prays. Millet remembered that his grandmother, “hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor dead”. The painting has the character of a memory, but its radiance is entirely real: the autumnal dusk of Barbizon. The spire is recognisably that of the village church in Chailly-en-Bière, southeast of Paris, where Millet would later be buried.

The painting remains in mind, like a song or a prayer. This is the experience of seeing it in person. But Millet’s ambitions are apparently still in question. That it was commissioned by an American patron (who never came to collect it) seems to qualify its religious content for some commentators. The National Gallery catalogue can’t be absolutely sure, for instance, that Millet knew the words of the Angelus by heart, even though he was raised in the Normandy fields, where church bells pealed for it three times a day. City-dwelling Catholics can recite that prayer even now and there seems no reason to ignore the emphasis of Millet’s title for the painting,

But how could he have come up with that composition? Was he painting from life, from memory, from sentimental fantasy? This too has been in doubt down the decades, presumably since it goes to Millet’s politics. His seraphic utterance “Je suis paysan paysan” (I am the peasant’s peasant) has been consistently challenged by scholars citing the objects in his rural studio, from replicas of Donatello to Flemish prints. As if he had never walked, or worked, the French fields with open eyes.

The many beautiful drawings in this show carry such an inner sense of labour that even if no textual evidence survives to give an exact name or date to the figures chopping wood, sowing seeds or winnowing the chaff, you would know that Millet had done it himself.

How hard it is to split wood: a man’s arm flails wearily behind his head, about to bring the mallet down again with a ringing crack that looks as if it will not be the last. A sower, head down in a crepuscular ploughed landscape, trudges exhaustedly along, trailing the seeds behind him like a sleepwalker. In a terrific painting of a massive felled trunk, two men are working a saw back and forth in the gloom, one of them in blue trousers so thin his sinews show through. His foot is wedged, painfully, against the wood for ballast.

There are traces of Rembrandt, especially in the light emitting from the winnower’s basket in the darkness; of Bruegel in the harvest scenes; of Daumier’s shape-making, though not his radical empathy. What Millet shows is what is there, in rural France, in compositions of exceptional care. In an earlier version of The Sower, borrowed from the National Museum Wales, a cow is grazing against the light on a bank high above the faltering figure trailing seeds in the darkness below. If you want politics, look at the landscape.

Millet’s fields are thistle-ridden, stony and rough. The workers are scratching a living. Miniature Monet haystacks stretch away behind the two figures in The Angelus, but they themselves are confined to the stubble in the foreground – like the three women in Millet’s The Gleaners.

It is no surprise that Van Gogh loved Millet. You sense the foot in the soil, the hand on the hoe, the poetry the Dutchman discovered in his scenes. And if it is possible to find Millet too subversive, or conservative, or religious, it is perhaps because his art remains open to all interpretations in what it so lucidly shows – which is nothing less (and perhaps nothing more) than the toiling and hauling and straining of life on the land, of this rural outdoor labour.

Millet: Life on the Land is at the National Gallery, London, until 19 October

Photographs by Musée d’Orsay/ Patrice Schmidt/ Bequeathed by Percy Moore Turner