"The Angelus"

The subject is beautiful:  a man and a woman are reciting the Angelus in a quiet field. Because they have paused in the middle of working, all the tools of their labor–a potato fork, basket, sacks, and a wheelbarrow–are right beside them.

Millet said: "The idea for The Angelus 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 a French painter renowned for his peasant subjects.In his later years Millet  treated scenes of rural work in an elevated style. Harvesters Resting (1853, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) cast its subject as a modern version of the story of Ruth and Boaz. At the Salon of 1857, The Gleaners (Louvre), a composition of grand dignity, nevertheless came under attack because some saw a subversive intent in its image of rural poverty. While the picture was on view, Millet received a commission from the American painter Thomas Appleton (1812-1884) for what was to become in later years his most famous painting, The Angelus (1859, Louvre).During the 1860s his work began to attract the attention of a widening circle of critics and collectors, not a few of them Americans. At the Salon of 1863 his Man with a Hoe (c. 1862, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) caused a controversy between indignant journalists who denounced this portrayal of an exhausted laborer as subhuman and cretinous and admirers who saw in it a tribute to stoic endurance of unrewarded toil.

His breakthrough to success came at the Salon of 1864, where the youth and near prettiness of his Shepherdess Guarding Her Flock (Louvre) won the hearts of the public who concluded that he had at last overcome his addiction to scenes of misery and discovered charm.

His paintings The Gleaners and The Angelus earned him the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1865.

Because it dwells on an aspect of social reality, the lives of peasants, Millet's work is usually assigned to the current of nineteenth-century realism. But in its treatment of that reality it is neither strictly modern nor visually objective. Guided by memories of art, Millet idealized the condition and appearance of the French peasantry. He had an eye for statuesque corporeality and for the telling gesture;  His modernity and originality lay, not in his choice of subjects, nor even in the depth of feeling he brought to them, but in his formal qualities, the power of his drawing and the boldness of his pictorial invention.

The Angelus prayer is well suited to the artist’s subject matter: two humble people paying homage to our Lord and His Blessed Mother in the Hail Mary, as well as in Gospel verses recalling His Incarnation as the Word entered the World. Its name comes from its opening words in Latin, “Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ.”(The Angel of the Lord Declared Unto Mary)

This wonderful prayer evolved from a recitation of three Hail Mary’s following an evening bell around the 12th century to its present form (with morning and midday recitations) in the 16th century.