A Peasant Family- Jean Michelin

Group Six: Aaron Krug, Steve O’Neill, David Driscoll

2/27/05

Forbidden Knowledge

Prof. Newlands

Collections/Reflections #4

Review of ‘A Peasant Family’ (1650-1660) by Jean Michelin

1.      Description. The painting is oil on canvas. There are four people; two children and two adults. The children are both male and the adults are one male and one female. All are dressed in worn, tattered clothing. Their clothing is made up of brown and tan colors. They are sitting on a side street with a busier, larger, more main thoroughfare behind them. It is a front lit picture with many earthy hues and tones throughout the picture. The figures are sitting by a small cage with two dead birds on it. A large three story building is in the background, located on the other side of the thoroughfare. One window has a plant; the other has a woman holding a child. Above the top story windows there are wooden poles sticking out from the building that have laundry draped over them. On the base floor in the street on the outside of the building there is a stand with dead birds hanging from the lip of the building. Two people stand near them.

2.      Analysis. All figures share the tones, colors, and textures of their surroundings. Only the lighting from a source in front of the painting separates them from the rest of the picture. The oil paints make them appear lifelike. The two adults are sitting and the children are standing, making them all relatively the same height. The people take up the bottom half of the painting while the street and the building in the background takes up the upper half. The background shapes are very angular, mostly made up of straight lines while the people in the forefront consist mostly of rounded and imperfect shapes. Their clothing and skin tones very much make them a part of their surroundings.

3.      Interpretation. The people in the forefront seem to be selling their wares, those being the dead fowl on the cages. They seem to be competing with the people in the background, since they are both selling the same thing. It appears that they are not very well off, and the pack that the boy carries may contain all of their belongings, allowing them to live wherever they are selling their items. The boy in the top left window seems to be daydreaming, looking out on the busy main street, viewing it from a distance. The four people in the forefront seem to be meeting the gaze of the viewer as if they were a customer. They all meet the stares of the person, none of them are ashamed of their clothing or their surroundings, like they know that they have a place in the society they live in. The male adult figure especially seems to be taking a grander, more sophisticated pose than the rest of them, putting his hat on his knee with his overcoat draping over his shoulders. It seems that he is not fooling himself about his place in the Parisian society, like he knows that because of him and the other working class people like him that society can continue. He seems to have the wisdom of the knowledge that civilization as we know it would fall without his class, and therefore takes pride in his place, no matter what anyone thinks about it.

4.      Judgment. This piece is not a painting that can be enjoyed at a glance, but one that has to be taken in for an amount of time. You have to look at it, make a connection with the people in it, and put yourself in their surroundings in order to see the true value. If you look close enough you can see how it would be to live in that time and that place as those people. The people, while stoic, seem to have a message all their own. Their forward gaze tells us many things that the casual onlooker would not see. The reason we judge the art as high as we did is because we place value more in the meaning that can be taken away from critically appraising the art, and less on what we think of the skill of the painter. The way we see it, you can have a great painter who is never famous, because although he is skilled at painting he never captures an emotion. On the other hand you can have a terrible painter who conveys a message, who makes a piece you can connect with, and we would value his art higher because he has learned to capture emotion with his art.

So if I were you I would now be thinking to myself, what does this have to do with diversity? Why didn't Aaron include this in communication, or even critical thinking, but diversity? What was he thinking? Well, let me tell you. I included this particular assignment in the diversity category because I believe that it has something to say about class struggle as a whole, back then and today. These people are so proud to be who they are, and the working class of today should be too. We are here, doing what we do, not taking handouts unless we have to, and without us civilization would fall. Like Marx said, we are the important ones, all the rich people do is just suck up unearned income, so without us they would have nothing. I don't know how this painting turned into a pamphlet for financial equality, but there it is. We live in a diverse world of financial highs and lows, and even though those people are in the low area they are still as proud as they can be. Rock on peasant people, more power to you.