The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet

The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet

Three backs bent to the ground

Gleaning, gathering the grain the harvesters have missed, was a right of the rural poor and the lowest work on the farm. Millet gives it the whole foreground. Two women stoop right down, one reaching for a stalk, the other with a handful already gathered; the third, half upright, is about to bend again. Their rough hands, heavy skirts and faded caps of blue, red and dull yellow are painted with the weight of sculpture. Behind them, in warm light, the real harvest goes on: great stacks of grain, a cart piled high, a crowd of workers and, on horseback at the right, the overseer.

Trouble at the Salon

Millet showed the picture at the Paris Salon of 1857, and many viewers found it unsettling. The canvas was large for a scene of farm labour, a size usually kept for history and religious painting, and less than a decade after the revolution of 1848 some critics saw a threat in the three women rather than a country idyll. Gleaning had a long history in art through the Book of Ruth, but these are not biblical figures. They are the poor of the plain near Barbizon, on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, where Millet lived and worked.

Where it hangs

The painting is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It came to the Louvre through the champagne producer Louise Pommery and moved to the Orsay with the national collection of nineteenth-century painting. It measures 83.5 by 110 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 5,356-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 35 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Musée d’Orsay, Paris · Wikidata Q1368055 · Wikimedia Commons