The Angelus (1859) by Jean-François Millet (1814-75) is one of those widely reproduced paintings you recognise without knowing quite where from. Two agricultural workers, a man and a woman, stand heads bowed in a field of potatoes, tools temporarily set down as they recite the Angelus, a prayer offered up daily at dawn, noon and dusk, in a brief respite from their labours. This is the third utterance of the day, and it is the quality of the light that transfixes the viewer – layers of pink and gold morphing into bruise-like grey, the final remnants of diurnal blue visible to the left.

The National Gallery’s new exhibition Millet: Life on the Land brings together The Angelus (1859, usually on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris) with a selection of Millet paintings and sketches from galleries around England, Scotland and Wales. In so doing, it gives context to the lives of the two protagonists depicted and reunites them with other figures whom we can imagine they must have known, for Millet’s focus was upon a single, mid-19th-century agrarian community, in Barbizon, in the Seine-et-Marne region of northern France. The Angelus, positioned at the centre of the room, stands out not only in its familiarity, but also for the fact that it is the only work displayed here that brings the sexes together. Elsewhere, the exhibition illuminates the strict segregation of 19th-century rural life: all the images to the left of The Angelus depict men; all those to its right, women.

Sowing, ploughing, lugging, winnowing, chopping, sawing, splitting: this was man’s work. Particularly striking is The Wood Sawyers (1850-2), an image of two men sawing a gigantic log. One has his back to us, the tension and strain visible in his ham-like thighs and sturdy, muscular calves. With their hoof-like clogs, their powerful paw-like hands, nearly the size of their heads, the men in this exhibition almost begin to resemble the livestock that toil alongside them. Millet’s brushwork makes us imagine the sweat, the groans, the splinters.

The men’s gestures are expansive, their bodies stretched outwards as they raise axes, stride out across fields, stretch arms and buckle knees to carry heavy loads. The women’s gestures are more contained, as contemporary decorum would demand: hands neatly placed on staffs in front of them, or clasped to their chests as they bear bales of sticks on their backs. Some may look as if they have stepped off a chocolate tin, but any sentimentality would be misplaced; Millet’s female subjects, whether young or old, would not have been excused from drudgery. In his paintings, they tend cows, sheep and geese, wash out milk pails, and undertake the back-breaking work of picking up leftover crops and gathering branches for fuel. In a sketch from the early 1850s (A Shepherdess), one young woman knits while she tends her sheep, maximising productivity and perhaps seeking some small antidote to the boredom of a life that must have been exactly the same every single day.

Many of Millet’s figures, particularly the women, are depicted alone, but even where figures are shown in groups, communication seems absent. As one man ploughs and another sows, they keep themselves to themselves. As a group of women carry great bundles of sticks on their backs, they trudge one behind the next, not side by side in conversation. The Angelus, again, is the exception: this is the only image in the exhibition in which people are depicted communing. The loneliness of this life is palpable.

Millet’s favoured colours were muted browns and greens, his brushstrokes often creating a soft-focus, almost blurred effect. Faces, it must be said, were not Millet’s strong suit, except in two sketches, in crayon and chalk respectively, of a young girl, aged perhaps 11 or 12, both preliminary studies for the 1849 oil painting A Shepherdess (not on display here). Peeping out coyly from beneath her bonnet, this child has real character, reminiscent of female figures immortalised two centuries earlier in the works of Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch. Elsewhere, however, Millet’s subjects – people he may well have known personally – have visages that are hazy, or even almost completely blank.

The exhibition notes attribute this to the fact that the artist would not paint his works en plein air, as the Impressionists would do later, but make only a few small sketches and then work from memory upon his return to the studio. Another interpretation would be that Millet sought to illustrate the fact that in this environment, the individual does not matter. This point is illuminated particularly clearly in the last painting in the exhibition, The Faggot Gatherers (1868-75), which stands apart from the others in having been painted later and having a distinctly more modern sensibility. The work was left unfinished, but one wonders how much more detail Millet ever intended to add. The bundles of sticks on the women’s backs are painted in great detail, so, too, the grain of the rugged terrain behind them, but their faces are just pink orbs, with the tiniest dash for an eye on the women nearest the front. If you live a life like this, Millet seems to suggest, all personality must be sublimated and suppressed: labour is the only thing that matters.

This exhibition is small, comprising just nine paintings and six sketches. There can be something satisfying about visiting a gallery to look carefully at a handful of works, rather than over-gorging. If your appetite isn’t quite sated, however, you could take a 15-minute walk to the nearby Royal Academy of Arts, where there is currently an exhibition of paintings by Van Gogh, some of which drew direct inspiration from Millet, and by Anselm Kiefer, who was inspired in turn by Van Gogh. Taken together, these two exhibitions, serendipitously in London at the same time, remind us of the cyclical nature of artistic influence, the same ideas and techniques coming around again and again, rather like the seasons, whose repetitive milestones and routines Millet’s peasants would have known so well.