Last year I learned more about, and was impressed by, Jean-François Millet when I read “To Plow His Furrow in Peace: Jean-François Millet’s art taps his peasant roots to honor the dignity of rural life,” a major article in the Spring 2021 issue of Plough Quarterly.** That became the seed for this blog post.
Millet (1814~75) was born in rural
northwestern France, and his most famous work is “The
Angelus,” an oil painting completed between 1857 and 1859.
The painting, which the Plough author says you may have seen “hanging in some grandma’s living room,” depicts two peasants bowing in a potato field to say a prayer, the Angelus, that together with the ringing of the bell from the church on the horizon marks the end of a day’s work.
I don’t remember when I first saw a
reproduction of this painting, but I’m sure it was when I was still a Missouri
farmboy.
Two earlier paintings by Millet are also
widely known and appreciated, perhaps especially by rural people: “The Sower”
(1850) and “The Gleaners” (1857).
What I did not know until I read the Plough
article is how Millet was criticized. The author says that Millet’s “rustic
paintings met with a great deal of negativity from critics and Parisian
society. The truthfulness with which they depicted rural people and rural life
was labeled mere ugliness.”
The sophisticated city folks thought that art
should depict “dignified things, like lords and ladies and historical events
and Greek myths and things like that. It was not for poor people.”
But by his paintings, Millet continued to
depict the sacredness to be found in ordinary rural life. And in the concluding
words of the Plough essay, to this day Millet’s “works remain a reminder
of the worthiness of the ordinary worker who lives an ordinary life.”
My father was born in rural northwestern
Missouri 101 years after Millet’s birth in France, and
while not a “peasant” such as those depicted in Millet’s paintings, he—and his
father—were “common” farmers, and from them I learned, and came to appreciate,
the dignity of rural life.
On Aug. 15, 2020 (my 82nd birthday),
I posted a blog article titled “My
Old Missouri Home,” and I won’t reiterate here what I wrote then, but it
was in part about “the benefits of being a farmboy.”
What I didn’t say in that article is that I learned
about the dignity of rural life from my father and his father. Grandpa George
lived on a farm in Worth County (Mo.) all of his life except for a brief period
in the early 1910s, and my father (d. 2007) did the same except for the years
from 1935 to 1945.
There were exceptions, but they and most other
farmers like them, were good, honest men who worked hard to provide for their
families, who were kind and helpful to their neighbors, and who didn’t get into
harsh verbal conflicts with anyone (except maybe on a few rare occasions).
Yes, 80~100 years after Millet, they embodied
the dignity of rural life that the French artist painted so beautifully, and I
remain grateful for what I learned from them.
But what about now? The world is much different now than when Millet painted “The Angelus”
in 1857—or when my father bought his farm in 1945. I am afraid, though, that the
dignity of rural life has deteriorated in the last forty years.
“Talk radio” (such as The Rush Limbaugh Show
from 1988 until Limbaugh’s death in 2021) and, to a lesser extent since it
requires cable, Fox News augmented the polarization of the general public,
including and perhaps especially rural Americans.
When 80% of the people vote the same way, as
they did in many of Missouri’s (and other states’) rural counties in 2016 and
2020, perhaps that indicates a notable loss of the dignity of rural life to the
polarizing forces in contemporary society.
That dignity has been tarnished in recent
years by the MAGA majority demonizing those with opposing political views and many
of those in the minority 20% feeling alienated from their neighbors/friends.
_____
**
Back in 2016, I posted “Following the Plough” on a Blogger.com page. Few have
accessed that page, so if you would like to know more about Plough Quarterly
and the Bruderhof community that produces it, click on this
link.
.jpg)