Millet - Gleaners

A realist painter, pastellist, engraver and draftsman, Jean-François Millet (1814 - 1875) is one of the founders of the Barbizon school. Faithful to one of his favorite subjects, peasant life, Millet delivers in this painting the result of ten years of research around the theme of gleaners.

These women embody the rural proletariat. They are allowed to pass quickly, before sunset, through the harvested fields to pick up the neglected ears of corn one by one. The painter depicts three of them in the foreground, their backs bent, their gaze fixed on the ground. He thus juxtaposes the three phases of the repetitive and exhausting movement that this harsh task imposes: bending down, picking up, getting up again.

Their austerity contrasts with the abundance of the harvest in the distance: haystacks, sheaves, carts and the multitude of bustling harvesters. This festive and luminous abundance seems all the more distant as the change in scale is abrupt. The low light of the setting sun accentuates the volumes of the foreground and gives the gleaners a sculptural appearance. It vividly highlights their hands, necks, shoulders and backs and brightens the colours of their clothes.

Without using picturesque anecdotes, through simple and sober plastic processes, Millet gives these gleaners, poor no doubt, but no less worthy, an emblematic value, devoid of any miserabilism.

Gleaners, 1857
Orsay Museum