The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (316 page)

(often known by his nickname, ‘Francisque’) (1642–79). French landscape painter of Flemish birth. Active mainly in Paris, he is also said to have visited England and Holland. No signed or documented works are known, but several are authenticated by early engravings. He worked in a style related to
Poussin
and
Dughet
, sometimes enlivened by romantic touches in the manner of Salvator
Rosa
, as in
Mountain Landscape with Lightning
(NG, London), one of the most original works of an artist usually content to be an able follower. His son
Jean
(1666–1723) was a landscape painter, and he too had a painter son,
Joseph
(1697?–1777).

 
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(1814–75).
French painter and graphic artist, born of a peasant family at Gruchy, near Cherbourg in Normandy. He studied locally, then in 1837 entered the studio of
Delaroche
in Paris. His early pictures consisted of conventional mythological and anecdotal
genre
scenes and portraits, but with
The Winnower
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris), exhibited at the
Salon
in 1848, he turned to the scenes of rustic life from which his name is now inseparable. He emphasized the serious and even melancholy aspects of country life, emotionalizing the labours of the soil and the sad solemnities of toil. Hostile critics accused him of being a socialist, but Millet's concerns were aesthetic rather than political and he said his desire was ‘to make the trivial serve to express the sublime’. In 1849 he settled at Barbizon, where he remained for the rest of his life apart from a stay in Cherbourg during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. Late in his career he turned increasingly to pure landscape, influenced by his close friend Théodore
Rousseau
. Millet passed much of his life in poverty, but his work began to bring him success in the 1860s and
The Angelus
(Musée d'Orsay, 1859) became perhaps the most widely reproduced painting of the 19th cent. This has had a harmful effect on his subsequent critical fortunes, for largely on the strength of it he has been pigeon-holed as a purveyor of pious sentimentality. His greatness lies rather in his drawing, which for its elimination of the inessential, investing the ordinary with weight and dignity, has been compared with that of
Seurat
. Van
Gogh
and Camille
Pissarro
were among those who admired Millet's work.

 
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(1810–83).
American sculptor, a jack-of-all-trades, who was self-taught as an artist. In 1848 he won a competition for the monument to President Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, Washington, and worked for five years on this, the first equestrian statue in the USA. He built his own foundry to cast the statue, which daringly has the rearing horse supported only by hind legs, and eventually succeeded at the seventh attempt. The ecstatic response when the statue was unveiled in 1853 brought him great financial rewards and the commission for an equestrian statue to George Washington in Washington Circle (1860). He spent his final years under a cloud, however, suspected of dishonesty in handling the metal assigned to him.

 
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miniature
.

A very small painting, particularly a portrait that can be held in the hand or worn as a piece of jewellery. The word is applied to manuscript
illuminations
as well as portraits and derives from the Latin
minimum
, the red lead used to emphasize initial letters, decorated by the
miniator
. Since the 17th cent. the term has been applied to all types of manuscript illustration on account of a mistaken etymology: the word was connected with ‘minute’ (small). What we today call a ‘miniature’ was called
historia
in the Middle Ages and the portraits painted by
Hilliard
and others were named ‘limnings’ or ‘pictures in little’ by the Elizabethans. They were painted on vellum (see
PARCHMENT
), or occasionally on ivory or card, and in the 17th and 18th cents. there was a vogue for miniatures done in an
enamelling
technique. The portrait miniature developed from a fusion of the traditions of medieval illumination and the
Renaissance
medal and flourished from the early 16th cent. to the mid 19th cent., when photography virtually killed it as a serious art form.

 
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Minimal art
.

A type of abstract art, particularly sculpture, characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a deliberate lack of expressive content; it emerged as a trend in the 1950s and flourished particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The roots of Minimal art can be traced to the geometrical abstractions of
Malevich
and the
ready-mades
of
Duchamp
in the second decade of the 20th cent., but as a movement it developed mainly in the USA and its impersonality is seen as a reaction against the emotiveness of
Abstract Expressionism
. ‘The theory of minimalism is that without the diverting presence of “composition”, and by the use of plain, often industrial materials arranged in geometrical or highly simplified configurations we may experience all the more strongly the pure qualities of colour, form, space and materials’ (
The Tale Gallery: An Illustrated Companion
, 1979). Minimal art has close links with
Conceptual art
(Minimalist sculpture often has a strong element of theoretical demonstration about it, with the artist leaving the fabrication of his designs to industrial specialists), and sometimes there are affinities with other contemporaneous movements, such as
Land art
. There is even a kinship with
Pop art
in a shared preference for slick, impersonal surfaces (some Minimal artists, however, have used ‘natural’ materials such as logs rather than machine-finished products). The leading Minimalist sculptors include Carl
Andre
, Don
Judd
, and Tony
Smith
. Minimalist painters (for whom the immediate precedents were
Albers
and
Reinhardt
) include Frank
Stella
(in his early work) and
Hard-Edge
abstractionists such as Ellsworth
Kelly
and Kenneth
Noland
.