Peasants and “Primitivism”: French Prints from Millet to Gauguin

April 18–June 9, 1996

Organized by the Mount Holyoke College Museum and curated by Robert L. Herbert, one of the leading scholars of Impressionism, this exhibition traced the rise of two related types of “primitivism” in nineteenth-century France.

The eighty works in the exhibition by artists such as Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, and Jean-François Millet, represent both a celebration of the pre-industrial conditions of rural life, labor and landscape, and an artistic primitivism of deliberately crude print-making techniques and styles.