The Angelus

The painting depicts two peasants bowing in a field over a basket of potatoes to say a prayer, the Angelus, that together with the ringing of the bell from the church on the horizon marks the end of a day's work. Millet was commissioned by the American would-be painter and art collector Thomas Gold Appleton, who never came to collect it. Millet said: "The idea for The Angelus came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed". When Appleton failed to take possession, Millet added a steeple and changed the initial title of the work, Prayer for the Potato Crop, to The Angelus. It depicts two peasants during the potato harvest in Barbizon, with a view of the church tower of Chailly-en-Bière. At their feet is a small basket of potatoes, and around them a cart and a pitchfork. Various interpretations of the relationship between the two peasants have been made, such as colleagues at work, husband and wife pair, or farmer and maidservant. An 1889 sales catalogue described them simply as "a young peasant and his companion". Much later, Salvador Dalí saw a print of this painting in his school and insisted that this was a funeral scene, not a prayer ritual and that the couple were portrayed praying and mourning over their dead infant. Although this was an unpopular view, at his insistence the Louvre X-rayed the painting, showing a small painted-over geometric shape strikingly similar to a coffin by the basket. It seems possible that Millet originally painted a burial – perhaps a rural version of Courbet's famous painting A Burial at Ornans (1850) – but then converted it to a recitation of the Angelus, complete with a visible church bell tower.