Jean-Charles Millet

Jean-Charles Millet was born in Paris on 10 February 1892, the son of the architect Charles-Louis-Émile Millet and grandson of Jean-François Millet, the painter of ‘The Angelus’ and ‘The Gleaners’. He grew up with the family name and the family’s drawings around him, trained as a painter and etcher, and lived most of his life in the Barbizon country at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, painting its villages, farms and rivers and the towns of the Loing, Moret above all, in the broad, earthy manner of the Barbizon school. He also painted the landscapes of La Hague in Normandy, his grandfather’s country, and made etchings and drypoints of peasant subjects.

His name is also attached to one of the scandals of the inter-war art market: having sold off the genuine drawings he had inherited, he used the family’s authenticating stamp on imitations, and was convicted in 1935 in the affair of the ‘faux Millet’, recently retold in a book by the investigating magistrate’s successor. Arrested during the Occupation, he died in the concentration camp at Dachau in December 1944. His own signed landscapes, modest and sincere, appear regularly in French sales.