Jean-François Millet was a celebrated French painter and member of what became known as the Barbizon School. In his dusky painting The Gleaners (1857), Millet meditated on the profound relationship he saw between peasants and the landscapes they farmed. “It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power,” he once said. Born on October 4, 1814 in Gruchy, France, Millet grew up in a deeply religious farming family, before being sent to Cherbourg to study under a local portrait painter. Traveling to Paris in 1837, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts where he became a pupil of the well-known history painter Paul Delaroche. Over the next decade, Millet moved ...