(jazz music) Dr. Zucker: We're in the Musee d'Orsay and we're looking at a painting by
Millet, which is called L'Angelus. It's a really famous
painting in the 19th century. Dr. Harris: Right, and into
the early 20th century, when very high sums were paid for it, but it's clearly not the star
at the Musee d'Orsay anymore. Dr. Zucker: It's a very sentimental scene. Dr. Harris: It is, and it's
a relatively small painting, showing two people who
have stopped to pray. They've heard the bells of the church
that we can see in the distance and they've stopped for a daily
prayer called the Angelus, which commemorates the annunciation and although it may seem like
a kind of religious painting, or a scene of people being
religious, mostly I think, for Millet it was a
memory of his childhood. Dr. Zucker: The way in which his
grandmother would stop everyone when they were doing
their weeding or planting so that they could do
their evening prayers. Dr. Harris: Right. So the man and the woman have
clearly stopped their work. The man holds his hat in
his hand and looks down. The woman also looks down,
holding her hands to her chest. Their tools are all around them
and the sun sets in the distance. The horizon is rather high. It's about the land and about
values and what's right. What's important is hard
work and remembering God and our place in the universe. It's a very moralizing image. Dr. Zucker: This is an
image that is cutting away at all of the artifice of the city and looking for the inherent moral values that are at the heart of what
the French hold as important. As you said, monumental, in the way that they stand against the horizon line. They're backlit, the sky is quite bright. Dr. Harris: Silhouetted. Dr. Zucker: Right, and that, in a sense, makes it hard to read their faces. They become everyman. Dr. Harris: And even though this is
not a painting of a religious subject, it's very 19th century
in that it's a painting of people who are being religious. It always seems like it's a little
bit hard in the 19th century to use Christian
iconography in the usual way and instead we find religious
experiences in sunsets. Dr. Zucker: Millet fed an
important appetite that existed. He had found a solution
locating, if not God, at least the reverence of
God, here in the modern world. (jazz music)