Plaine de l'Angelus - Site de la peinture

Millet painted this plain every season for twenty-six years. He knew its light at every hour, its mud in winter, its dust in summer, its strange flatness that makes the church steeple of Chailly feel impossibly close and impossibly far at the same time. L'Angelus was not a religious statement - Millet said himself it came from a childhood memory of his grandmother stopping work when the bell rang. But standing here at dusk, with the same steeple on the same horizon, it becomes something larger than biography. The plain has not changed much. The bell still rings.