Humble peasants … or an odyssey of sex and death? The Millet masterpiece that electrified modern art

The Guardian

18-07-2025

It was Salvador Dalí who turned a small, intense rural scene called The Angelus, painted by Jean-François Millet in 1857-59 and hugely popular in its day, into a totem of modern art.
In the original, a pious peasant couple have heard the Angelus bell from a distant church, the Catholic call to prayer, and paused their work digging potatoes to lower their heads and pray. But from Dalí's writings, we know he saw far more in the painting, from obscene sex to family tragedy. In one of his many versions of it, Atavism at Twilight, the couple sprout agricultural implements from their bodies. In his surreal drawings these good country people become mouldering, mummified husks, or are transformed into fossils by time and sadness. Now that the original painting is being lent by the Musée d'Orsay to the National Gallery as the star of its forthcoming show Millet: Life on the Land, we will all get a chance to obsess over this innocent-seeming artwork.
The Angelus was an instant hit in the 1800s, widely reproduced, while the original passed through a string of private collections for record prices until the Louvre, which first tried to buy it for France in 1889, acquired it in 1910. In 1932 it received perhaps the ultimate fan homage: it was attacked – slashed several times with a penknife. After being repaired, it remained in the Louvre until the Orsay opened in 1986.
Decades ahead of Dalí, Van Gogh also copied it in a fervent 1880 drawing that was one of his first artistic efforts – its untrained clumsiness makes the emotion even more touching. He revered The Angelus as his ideal model of all that art should be and do. In their fascination with Millet's masterpiece, both these modernist giants show how a work of art can turn into something else in the beholder's mind. Dalí deliberately induced a state akin to illness in his mind in order to hallucinate upon The Angelus. 'The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad,' he said. Van Gogh was of course less able to switch it on and off.
Van Gogh was in London, working at the Covent Garden branch of the art dealer Goupil et Fils, when he wrote about its power in one of his earliest letters. 'That painting by Millet, L'angelus du soir,' he told his brother Theo in 1874, 'that's it, indeed – that's magnificent, that's poetry.' At the age of just 21, five years before he decided to become a painter, the Dutch pastor's son saw something uniquely poetic in The Angelus.
Its creator, Jean-François Millet, was then near the end of his life. Like Bruegel centuries before him, Millet painted rural life so authentically that people thought he was a peasant sharing his world. This was not entirely groundless: he was born into a farming family from Grouchy, near the Channel coast in Normandy. Millet said The Angelus depicted a memory of this childhood: 'The idea came to me because I remembered that my 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 departed.'
Millet was not a naive artist. He trained in Paris with the history painter Paul Delaroche, famed for The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833). But things didn't go well and he retreated to Cherbourg. He seemed stuck in a career as a local portrait painter.
Then, suddenly, he found himself. Millet started painting the hard life of the peasantry. It was a political decision. He had his first hit with The Winnower, a painting of a man shaking a basket of grain, throwing golden specks high in the air so when they fall the wheat will be separated from the chaff. Does that sound allegorical? It surely is, for Millet unveiled this image of a peasant weeding out corrupt bad seeds at the Paris Salon in 1848, the year revolutions convulsed Europe. The paintings that followed are monuments to backbreaking rural work: The Sower; The Gleaners. Millet doesn't paint the landscape as an idyll but a place where the poor are worked to death.
Van Gogh saw Millet's compassion through a religious lens. Soon after that early letter to Theo he was sacked and, after a spell teaching, tried to become a preacher and missionary to the poor. His family thought he had a religious mania. His fervour included worshipping Millet. When he saw an exhibition of Millet's drawings, he raved, 'I felt like telling myself, take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.'
Van Gogh's debt to Millet is obvious in his early work. In his 1885 drawing Peasant Woman Digging, he gives the digger massive, earthy presence – like Millet's folk. But his most blatant reference to The Angelus is The Potato Eaters.
In Millet's Angelus, the peasants have taken a break from their arduous toil digging potatoes from the hard earth: we see spuds in their basket and in a bulging sack in their wheelbarrow. Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters feels like the next chapter. The peasants have gone home to share a humble meal with their family. Van Gogh stakes his claim here to succeed Millet as a peasant painter.
But did Van Gogh respond so intensely to The Angelus for reasons that were harder to name than politics or religion? A surrealist would say yes. Dalí would see unnameable insinuations in The Angelus – and being Dalí, name them.
For him, this painting was 'the most troubling, the most enigmatic, the densest, the richest in unconscious thoughts that has ever been.' Seen through his eyes, The Angelus is less a slice of rustic life, more a kitsch surrealist dreamwork.
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Take a look at Millet's scene. The brown lumps of potatoes in the basket look turd-like while the shapeless sack might contain part of a body. The three prongs of the huge fork have been driven into the ground with unwonted violence. If that doesn't seem phallic enough, the two thick hafts of the wheelbarrow poke from the woman's skirts. Do these Freudian intimations point to something unspeakable in the figures' relationship? In Dalí's Atavism at Twilight, the fork is stuck in the woman's back: the man dreams of sodomising her. She's his mum, according to Dalí.
Alternatively, he suggested, they are the parents of a dead child. Dalí believed that Millet had originally painted a grave in the foreground. You can sort of see it. He persuaded the Louvre to X-ray it and claimed the results confirmed his theory. It haunts his eerie 1965 painting The Perpignan Station, in which the grave becomes a railway track dividing the Angelus couple. Perpignan, the first station in France coming from Spain, and where papers were checked, becomes here a liminal place between life and death.
Dalí had enough ideas about The Angelus to fill a book, and they did. He penned The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus in the 1930s, and published it three decades later. It has been hailed as the most ambitious theorisation of what he called his 'paranoiac-critical method' in which you hallucinate layers and metamorphoses of an object or image. Did he mean a word of it? Was he really obsessed with The Angelus or did he just enjoy the idea that he was?
One piece of evidence his delirium was authentic is the 1929 film he created with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, in which a couple stand like the peasants in The Angelus (but with male and female positions reversed) until their love petrifies and they are buried in sand. This film, Dalí's most spontaneous work of dream art, was made before he went public with his Millet obsession. So The Angelus really was lodged in his psyche. He soon repainted it in his 1933 work Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, in which the couple become colossal, slowly eroding monuments towering over a desert.
Dalí's lifelong attempts to understand why The Angelus hooked him became a surreal odyssey of sex and death that is a good guide to enjoying a work of art. We should all be a bit paranoiac-critical when we visit an art gallery and let a work of art suggest as many things as come into our minds.
I can relate to it because I'm strangely thrilled that Millet's painting of two French peasants in a flat, bleak landscape with a church spire on the gold and bronze skyline is coming to the National Gallery. The first time I saw it was nowhere near a museum but in a hypermarket in rural France on a camping trip when I was a teenager. There it was, as a cheap print on canvas, this glowing, frozen scene. I had to buy it.
Why does art capture us? Sometimes a particular painting just seems to say more than you can express, and stays inside you. This is the mystery of art, and the mystery of The Angelus. I'm not saying what I see in it – I am not sure I want to know, let alone confess it. But it calls me like a bell at twilight.
Millet: Life on the Land is at the National Gallery, London, from 7 August to 19 October