The Cliffs of Gréville

The cliffs of Gréville, near Millet's birthplace of Gruchy on the Cotentin peninsula, were among the most dramatic coastal landscapes available to him in his Norman homeland. This 1871 canvas — painted during or shortly after the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War — reflects Millet's return to Normandy during the conflict, when he temporarily evacuated from Barbizon with his family. The cliffs held personal significance, the landscape of his youth rendered with the mature painter's full command of atmospheric effects. Now in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the canvas shows Millet's late approach to landscape: broad, atmospheric, concerned less with botanical or geological precision than with the emotional weight of coastal exposure. The Gréville coast had been painted before by others, but Millet brought to it the same gravity that characterized his peasant subjects — treating the cliffs as enduring geological fact in the same spirit that he treated the labor of gleaners and sowers as enduring human fact. The work belongs to a larger group of late Millet landscapes in which the earlier emphasis on figures is reduced or eliminated entirely.

The canvas handling is notably free in the cliff and sky passages, with broadly swept strokes defining the massive geological forms. Millet uses a cool, silvery palette for the coastal light — grays, blue-greens, and muted ochres — quite different from the warm earth tones of his Barbizon interiors.