The Angelus (painting)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"... Angelus du soir become ironically transformed in the modern petrified visions of Dali's illustration for Les Chants de Maldoror and Archeological Reminiscences of Millet's Angelus, and in the death mask of L'Atavisme du crepuscule."--A Theory of Parody (1985) by Linda Hutcheon |
Related e |
Featured: |
The Angelus (L'Angélus, 1857–59) is a painting by French artist Jean-François Millet. It is one of the most celebrated and reproduced images of prayer.
The painting was commissioned by Thomas Gold Appleton, an American art collector who was based in Boston, Massachusetts, and who had previously studied with Barbizon painter, Constant Troyon, a friend of Millet's. It was completed during the summer of 1857. Millet added a steeple and changed the initial title of the work, Prayer for the Potato Crop to The Angelus when the purchaser failed to take possession in 1859. Displayed to the public for the first time in 1865, the painting changed hands several times, increasing only modestly in value, since some considered the artist's political sympathies suspect. Upon Millet's death a decade later, a bidding war between the US and France ensued, ending some years later with a price tag of 800,000 gold francs.
The disparity between the apparent value of the painting and the poor estate of Millet's surviving family was a major impetus in the invention of the droit de suite, intended to compensate artists or their heirs when works are resold.
See also
- "The Tragic Myth of The Angelus of Millet", a text by Salvador Dalí on The Angelus