Millet: Life on the Land review – phallic forks and suggestive wheelbarrows enliven a landscape of toil

National Gallery, LondonThere’s a undeniably erotic charge to Millet’s paintings of gloomy hard work – reminding us that, behind the hoes, these are real people with real desiresThe figures in Jean-François Millet’s 1859 painting The Angelus, a French icon that’s come to the UK on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, seem extremely odd on close inspection. Their faces are obscure, their bodies intriguing under their shapeless work clothes. What age are they? How are they related? The man is quite young, his top shirt button loose, although his legs are as stiff as a doll’s, inside thick, rough-cut trousers. It’s harder to tell the woman’s age because she stands in profile, a breeze pressing her heavy skirt against her legs, as she clasps her hands. They might be a married couple or, as this painting’s unlikely fan Salvador Dalí claimed, mother and son. Their physicality is intense. The phallic prongs of a thick wooden potato fork and wheelbarrow shafts add to the feeling that, now the working day is done and they’re saying their prayers, they can finally get to bed. But if they’re mother and son? I refer you to Dr Dalí.I think there’s a reason Millet makes The Angelus not so much a religious as an erotic landscape. It was the climax of his love affair with the French peasantry. Millet made it his life’s work to portray the rural poor – a class that had been denied full humanity. He depicts lives of backbreaking toil but wants you to see that, behind the hoe, is a human being with a mind, a body, desires. Continue reading...

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