La Mer vue du haut de la falaise de Landemer by Jean-François Millet was created in 1870. The painting is in Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims. The size of the work is 47,4 x 60,5 cm and is made as an dry pastel and black pencil on beige watermarked industrial laid paper.
Throughout his career, Jean-François Millet was haunted by the immensity of the coastal landscapes of his childhood; which explains his fascination for the infinity of the plains around Barbizon. His first known landscape dates from 1844 and would be “Les Falaises de la Hague” or “Le Castel Vendon” (Cherbourg, Thomas Henry museum) – coastal site near Gruchy, his native village. At the end of his life, he will not forget his first experiences in Normandy, which will lead him to represent the same places – notably “Le Castel Vendo” (1871, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts). “The Sea seen from the top of the Landemer cliff” was probably drawn during the artist’s retreat to Cherbourg in 1870 after the declaration of war and the German invasion.
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
