A Man Digging
Sheet: 8 x 5 3/4 inches (20.32 x 14.61 cm)
Fifty Years of Gifts to the Print Department, Part 1, 1933-1958: 50th Anniversary Exhibition: October 23 - November 20, 1983, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, October 23-November 20, 1983, no. 26.
This work reprises a composition from paintings and drawings produced earlier in Jean-François Millet’s career. With familiar compositions, Millet could focus on technical aspects of the printmaking medium. By simplifying the original arrangements and enlarging the figures, Millet gave his printed subjects monumental stature.
Millet uses the medium’s unrefined aesthetic with its stark tonality and forceful marks to emphasize the simplicity and harshness of peasant life. The subject of the digger turning over soil consumed Millet for almost 20 years. A Man Digging represents one of the peasant’s most physically strenuous tasks, one in which soil is prepared for sowing. This backbreaking labor was necessary because most peasants could not afford the work animals needed to operate a plow. Though Millet proclaimed that his art was not political, it reflects the period’s pressing social concerns regarding the plight of France’s impoverished rural communities.
“Liberal with Art,” Kansas City Star 56, no. 106 (January 1, 1936): 8, as Man Digging.
[George L. McKenna], The Fifty Years of Gifts to the Print Department, Part 1, 1933-1958: 50th Anniversary Exhibition: October 23 - November 20, 1983, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1983), no. 26.
