Laura Cumming

The painting is The Angelus, painted in 1859 by Jean-Francois Millet, who is, I always think, rather amusingly, he's spelt M-I-L-L-E-T, like Millet, and R. Millet is spelt M-I-L-L-A-I-S, and I don't know, it's sort of strange.

Very confusing.

I wanted us to look at this painting because it was, and is still, I think, in La France Profonde, the most...

famous image of devotion in French art, but it's also for a very long period, the most popular painting in France.

And it comes a bit like the skating minister in Scotland.

It comes to represent the French to the French.

Now, so if you don't know the painting, let me just say,

It's a small painting.

It shows us two figures who are standing stock still, heads bent in prayer, their bodies are sort of haloed, backlit by this golden evening rays across an immense field.

They have been digging potatoes.

You can see unearthed potatoes, not

very clear around their clogged feet.

It's a man and a woman.

And away in the distance is a sort of tin tack of blue spire beneath high pink clouds.

It's twilight.

And what you are seeing

in this painting is the moment at which the bells from that spire are ringing out across the landscape to call people on the land to prayer.

And hence the title of the painting, The Angelus, which is the prayer, which in these kind of pre-industrial days where we don't have yet, you know, watches and clocks and so on, this happens three times a day and it marks the span of the day, sunset, noon and dusk.

And I think, do you know the prayer?

It is not a neutral painting at all.