Millet's Ideology Regarding the Peasant Class
Millet's art career was plagued by harsh criticism of his work from critics of his time. A book entitled Portraits, written by John Berger, details some of these criticisms.
Millet was lambasted as a socialist throughout his life by the center and right of France. These critics were outraged at Millet's work which they felt was too sympathetic to the plight of the peasantry. Depicting the peasants in strain and overworked in their labor was seen as a possible disruption in the social order.
Modern critics, like John Berger, have their own claims against Millet.
Berger argues that Millet's art fails to make the peasant a central focus. Because Millet depicted the peasantry within picturesque landscapes and painted with oil paint (participating in the tradition of European oil landscapes), Millet supposedly fails to truly convey the suffering of the peasantry.
In Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys, Berger would state that by depicting a beautiful sky and landscape, Millet fails to emphasize the way the environment poses danger and hardship on the peasant woman.
These views of Millet are wholly contradictory, one stating that Millet does not do enough to convey the peasantry's suffering and the other arguing that Millet could harm the social order by empathizing with the peasantry. However, they are valuable insofar as they allow us to tease out Millet's actual view of peasants and how he sought to portray them.
Robert Herbert argues that Millet's devotion to Realism and Naturalism, connected to the idea that he merely "painted what he saw," proves that Millet was a "humanitarian fatalist." This means that he was willing to depict the suffering of the peasantry that he saw in the world, but did not offer any prescription to fix it. He also believed that the peasantry as a whole would be unable to ever rise above its circumstances and would always exist.
References
Berger, John. Portraits: John Berger on Artists. Edited by Tom Overton, Verso, 2017.
Herbert, Robert L. “Millet Revisited - I.” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 104, no. 712, 1962, pp. 294–305. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/873713.
Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner’s Art through the Ages - A Concise Western History, 3rd Ed. Cengage Learning, Inc, 2015