Der Mann mit der Hacke

When this weary field-worker appeared at the Paris Salon of 1863, respectable visitors were genuinely alarmed. Some critics called the man brutish, even compared him to a killer. Others read the painting as dangerous socialist propaganda. Millet insisted he meant no politics, only the plain truth of labour, a man pausing over his hoe in a field still full of stones and weeds. But the timing made calm reading impossible. The Industrial Revolution was pulling people off the land and into the cities, and here was a peasant painted at monumental scale, dignified and exhausted, refusing to be picturesque. Millet worked at Barbizon, a village on the edge of a forest where a group of painters had gone to live close to the countryside they painted. His labourer looks up at no one.