You know the name, you know he is a 19th century French artist but like me you may be unfamiliar with his work.
Jean-François Millet painted lumpen agricultural workers in a drab palette: Van Dycke brown, Millet mud. He was a dim star in a bright constellation: the Barbizon school. Every international gallery has a Millet or two but the National Gallery hardly strayed beyond Wales and Scotland to assemble the small exhibition I saw. His pictures are utterly cheerless. The NG does have perhaps J-F M’s best known daub, “The Angelus”, borrowed from the Musée d’Orsay. Millet called it “Prayer for the Potato Crop”. Have you ever said a prayer for a potato? As there is a church in the distance, unable to sell it, he changed the name. “The Angelus” has greater resonance.
If I may stray to my childhood, the Angelus was part of growing up; the repetitive prayer and the tolling. One morning at breakfast my grandfather asked me if I had been to a funeral. He liked to ask questions to which he knew the answer. Accordingly, I accompanied him to St Columcille’s at Togher for the funeral of the man who rang the Angelus. I knew him and his name but both are now lost. The church is architecturally of little merit but I direct your attention to The Drogheda Argus in June 1866.
“The stone having being blessed, the Messrs Hammond stepped forward, and before presenting the trowel to Lord Bellew read the inscription on it as follows aloud – ” Presented by A and N Hammond to The Right Hon Patrick Lord Bellew, on the occasion of his laying the foundation stone at the Church of Saint Columkille Togher, 9th June 1866. Rev J.K. Markey PP, J Murray architect.”
Mary Kenny puts a fanciful but delightful and poignant spin on this drab, daub in her letter to The Spectator.
“Sir: I feel that Craig Raine rather missed the point in his remarks about the painting of ‘The Angelus’ (Arts, 16 August). It may not be numbered among great paintings, but it is a significant painting, and even genuinely iconic. At one time a copy of Millet’s picture hung in almost every peasant home in France – and Ireland – where agricultural workers paused when the Angelus bell rang. ‘People recognised themselves in the dignity the painting conferred on them,’ wrote Patrick Joyce in his fine history Remembering Peasants. He considers it ‘magnificent’ because of what it tells us about social history, and what it meant.
It has also been suggested that the man and woman praying are mourning, and that the basket of potatoes at their feet was painted over what may have been a representation of an infant’s coffin. If this is so, it is even more meaningful.
Mary Kenny
Deal, Kent”
I can certainly imagine praying for the potato crop if its success made the difference between a year in which one got a little ahead or a year in which one fell disastrously behind.
In Colorado, in late summer, there would be prayers in the churches for the crops, meaning I suppose wheat. There are farms within the Archdiocese of Washington, but fewer and fewer. I can’t say whether I’ve ever heard prayers for crops here.