Featuring paintings, drawings, prints, books, and journals, mostly from Getty collections, the exhibition opens September 12 at the Getty Center and will be on view through December 10, 2023.
When Millet debuted Man with a Hoe at the 1863 Paris Salon, it appalled the bourgeoisie who considered it brutish and frightening, and even compared the figure to a serial killer. The painting was seen as a provocative act of political protest and deemed a new low for modern realism.
“Millet’s Man with a Hoe certainly counts amongst the Getty Museum’s most historically important works of 19th-century European art,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the Getty Museum. “This is the first exhibition to focus on this iconic work and we anticipate that visitors—both local and international—will be fascinated by its transatlantic journey and the dramatic impact that it had on artists on both continents.”
The exhibition begins by considering Millet’s iconography of rural labor in the years preceding Man with a Hoe. Raised in a farming community in Normandy and inspired by democratic ideals following the 1848 French Revolution, Millet pioneered a new mode of genre painting focused on rural labor, gaining recognition in the 1850s for compositions like The Gleaners and The Diggers, etched versions of which will be on view.
The exhibition then dives into the negative reception of Man with a Hoe at the Salon in 1863, when it became the subject of harsh caricatures, and explores how Millet responded to the criticism. He published a defiant artist’s statement and explored less controversial subjects to appease critics and appeal to the market. One such work was Shepherdess and Her Flock, which is on loan from Musée d’Orsay for the exhibition.
After Millet’s death in 1875, the stature of Man with a Hoe rose quickly. Auction and exhibition catalogues from the 1880s illustrate how the painting’s status as a key masterpiece in Millet’s oeuvre was cemented during this period. When San Francisco collectors Ethel and William H. Crocker purchased the painting in Paris in 1890 and shipped it to California, it immediately became the most famous European picture on the West Coast.
In 1899, the painting stirred up controversy once again when poet Edwin Markham published “The Man with the Hoe” in the San Francisco Examiner. Directly inspired by the painting, this protest poem described the brutalization of humanity by oppressive labor, blamed the ruling classes, and declared prophetically about a future reckoning—setting off a debate that raged in newspapers across the country. To evoke this moment, the exhibition showcases various editions of Markham’s poem and a journal article in which Markham defended himself against critics.
The exhibition concludes with a shocking twist: Millet’s own grandson, Jean-Charles Millet, and a painter associate, Paul Cazot, were exposed in the early 1930s for producing and selling Millet fakes, including a purported oil study for Man with a Hoe, which has been recently rediscovered and will be featured in the exhibition. This is the first time the original Man with a Hoe will be publicly displayed with the forgery, offering a rare opportunity for the public to examine them together.
“No 19th-century painting in Getty’s collection has had a public life as controversial and far-reaching as Millet’s Man with a Hoe,” says Scott Allan, curator of paintings at the Getty Museum. “We hope the exhibition will shed new light on an all-too-familiar work while underscoring its enduring artistic potency and social and cultural significance.”
Reckoning with Millet’s Man with a Hoe was curated by Scott Allan, curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, and is accompanied by a book of scholarly essays published by Getty Publications.