Hunting Birds at Night

Known for his realistic portrayals of French peasants, Millet produced this painting at the very end of his life. He based the scene on stories from his childhood that told of great flights of wild pigeons. When the birds settled in trees at night, the peasants blinded them with light from torches and then clubbed hundreds to death. By the 1870s Millet's paintings of rural life were among the most famous in France. His subjects are nearly all drawn from the peasantry, done just as the countryside was being depopulated by immigration to the new industrial centers. But unlike many other artists who worked in the very popular specialty of "peasant painting", Millet's great genius was his ability to bind his subjects to their native place while simultaneously elevating them to a level of universal humanity. Much of his success was based on his evocation of a communal memory of a lost rural world that was either Arcadian or pathetic or a combination of both.