Jean-Francois Millet's Profound Impact on Van Gogh and His Work

Artists usually tend to find inspiration from other artists and they incorporate those styles and ideas into their own work, adding their own twist to them. For Vincent Van Gogh, there were a lot of artists who had an impact on his art but none more so than the French master Jean-Francois Millet.

Today Millet (1814-75) is not particularly well known outside his native France, but in Van Gogh’s time he was arguably the world’s most famous 19th-century artist.

In 1875, as a 22-year-old living in Paris, Van Gogh had seen an exhibition of Millet’s drawings which filled him with inspiration. Six years later, when Van Gogh first set out to become an artist, he drew copies of Millet’s prints, to help improve his own figure drawing.

(Image credit: Vincent Van Gogh/Kroller-Muller Museum; Wikimedia Commons)