The Angelus by Jean-François Millet

The Angelus by Jean-François Millet

The bell at evening

A man and a woman in a potato field have stopped work. He holds his hat; she folds her hands; the fork stands in the ground and the basket sits between them. Far off on the horizon, small and exact, is the spire of the church at Chailly, and if you know the picture you can almost hear it. Millet said he painted it remembering his grandmother, who would stop the family at the sound of the bell to say the Angelus for the dead.

It is one of the most reproduced paintings of the nineteenth century — on holy cards, in kitchens, over beds — and it earned that by being completely sincere.

Barbizon to the Louvre

Painted between 1857 and 1859 and first sold for 1,000 francs; thirty years later it was fought over between France and the United States, fetching 553,000 francs in 1889 and 750,000 when it was bought back for France the next year. Salvador Dalí was obsessed with it. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

About this print

Made from the Google Art Project capture, 7,053 pixels wide, in the painting's landscape format.

Sources: Musée d'Orsay, RF 1877 · Wikidata Q2571560 · Wikimedia Commons