A Woman Baking Bread by Jean-François Millet was created in 1854. The painting is in Kröller-Müller Museum. The size of the work is 55 x 46 cm and is made as an oil on canvas.

Millet paints mainly the people who live and work in these landscapes. Until then, depictions of peasants and their wives in art were nothing more than a decorative element in picturesque or nostalgic scenes. Millet breaks with that tradition. He paints the men and women in a way that is simultaneously realistic and heroic, as large figures deeply connected to the land, like this imposing woman baking bread. He aims to depict the honesty and simplicity of peasant life. Read more in Kröller-Müller Museum.

About the Artist: French artist Jean-François Millet was born in Gruchy, Gréville-Hague. He was a French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his paintings of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the Realism art movement. In 1833 his father sent him to Cherbourg to study with a portrait painter named Bon Du Mouchel. By 1835 he was studying with Théophile Langlois de Chèvreville, a pupil of Baron Gros, in Cherbourg… Read more

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