Les pacificateurs, à San-Stéphano

Signed and dated ‘F.D. Millet/1878’ (lower right)

The present painting, dated 1878, commemorates the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano on 3 March 1878 which brought an end to the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. Though Millet had only been covering the war as a journalist, he was afterwards decorated by Russia with the Cross of St. Stanislaus and the Cross of St. Anne for military advice and exceptional service, and also by Romania with the Iron Cross for his bravery under fire and for his services to those wounded in battle. Millet was also one of only four war correspondents who accompanied the Russian army to San Stefano for the signing of the Treaty, so his experience of the war and its conclusion had both been firsthand. Here, he commemorates the end of the brutal conflict between the Russian coalition and the Ottoman Empire with the simplest of acts – the lighting of a cigarette. Rather than focus on the more formal aspects of the peace treaty, Millet instead keeps his focus on the soldiers with whom he had been embedded. He depicts a Russian soldier and an Ottoman soldier, who would have only the day before been adversaries on the field of battle, extending their own gesture of peace to one another, as the Russian solder takes a pause from his celebratory smoke to light the Ottoman soldier’s cigarette with his own. Millet hints only subtly that it is the Russian coalition that has been the victor in this conflict by showing the Russian soldier’s bag containing trophies taken from other Ottoman soldiers during the fighting.

Francis ‘Frank’ Davis Millet lived perhaps one of the most colorful lives of all the American artists who trained in Europe in the 19th century. In addition to being an artist, Millet was an avid traveler, journalist, author and war correspondent who could speak and write in six languages. Born in Massachusetts, at the age of only 15 Millet joined the Massachusetts regiment and served in the American Civil War as a drummer and a surgical assistant to his father. He received an MA from Harvard in 1869, but his interest in journalism led him to afterwards take a job as a reporter for the Boston Courier. Millet trained in Antwerp at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in 1871-1872 and spent much of the 1870s traveling and working as an artist in Europe. Even still, he kept his newspaper contacts open and when the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 broke out Millet became the war correspondent for the New York Herald, the Times of London, and served as special artist to the London Graphic. After the war, Millet married Elizabeth Merrill in Paris in 1879 and Mark Twain served as his best man. Millet’s wife and children would all be painted by John Singer Sargent, a family friend. Millet’s prolific career as an artist and a writer encompassed far too many accomplishments to enumerate here, including involvement with at least four World’s Fairs, major artistic public commissions, serving on the boards of numerous important museums, academies, and artistic societies in America and Europe, and publishing his own writings as well as his translations of Tolstoy’s work. In 1912, the artist boarded the Titanic in Cherbourg as a first-class passenger, and would be one of the 1,503 who died in the sinking. True to form, Millet was reportedly last seen helping women and children into lifeboats. At a memorial for Millet in 1913, Senator Elihu Root said of him: ‘He must have been born with a sense of the beautiful and a love for it, for he devoted his life to it…He was one of the most unassuming and unselfish of men…He was a man of great strength and force, decision and executive capacity…He always pressed on to the accomplishment of his purposes, purposes in which self was always subordinate.’ – Christie’s