The Gleaners
Jean-François Millet (1814 to 1875) · 1857
Three peasant women bend low over a harvested field, picking up the stray stalks of wheat left behind by the reapers. Gleaning was a right granted by custom to the poorest people of a village, allowed only after the harvest was in and often only at set hours. Far behind the women the real harvest goes on: loaded carts, tall stacks of grain, a crowd of workers and a steward on horseback, all bathed in golden evening light. The three figures in the foreground are outside that abundance, gathering crumbs from it. Millet, who was himself the son of Normandy farmers, painted them with the gravity of figures on a church wall.
Notice the rhythm of the three bodies: two bent almost double, the third straightening with a hand on her back, so that together they make a slow wave of movement across the picture. The faces are shadowed and unspecific, which makes the women stand for all the rural poor rather than three individuals. Millet paints the coarse fabric of their clothes in blocks of blue, red and ochre, and the stubble of the field in dry, scratchy strokes. The light is low and warm, but it warms the distant harvest more than the women. The whole painting is held in a tension between beauty and hardship.
When it was shown at the Salon of 1857, conservative critics saw a political threat in it, a reminder of the peasant uprisings of 1848 and of the gap between rich and poor. Millet sold it for a modest sum. Thirty years later it was bought at auction for a fortune and presented to the Louvre in 1890, by which time Millet had become one of the most admired painters in France and a hero to the young Van Gogh, who copied his work again and again. Look at the tiny figure on horseback at the far right, the overseer, the only person in the field who is not working.
Did You Know? Van Gogh so revered Millet that he copied The Gleaners and other Millet compositions in his own colours while at the asylum in Saint-Rémy.
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