A farmer and his wife stop working in a potato field at dusk to pray the Angelus, as the church bell rings in the distance. Millet said it was a memory of his grandmother, who would stop whatever she was doing when the bell rang.

It became one of the most reproduced paintings of the nineteenth century. Salvador Dalí was obsessed with it and insisted the basket once covered a child’s coffin. An X-ray in 1963 did show a dark shape there.