Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners

Like Courbet, Jean-François Millet (1814-1878) found his subjects in the people and occupations of the everyday world. Millet was one of a group of French painters of country life who, to be close to their rural subjects, settled near the village of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau. This Barbizon School specialized in detailed pictures of forest and countryside. Millet, their most prominent member, was born into a prosperous farming family in Normandy, but was keenly aware of the hard lot of the country poor. In The Gleaners, he depicted three impoverished women – members of the lowest level of peasant society – performing the backbreaking task of gleaning. Landowning nobles traditionally permitted peasants to glean, or collect, the wheat scraps left in the field after the harvest. Millet characteristically placed his large figures in the foreground against a broad sky. Although the field stretches back to a rim of haystacks, cottages, trees, and distant workers and a flat horizon, the gleaners quietly doing their tedious and time-consuming work dominate the canvas.

The French public reacted to his work with disdain and suspicion. In the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, Millet’s investiture of the poor with solemn grandeur did not meet with approval from the prosperous class. Socialism was a growing movement, and both its views on property and its call for social justice, even economic equality, threatened and frightened the bourgeoisie. Millet’s sympathetic portrayal of the poor seemed to much of the public to be a political manifesto.^[1]