Der Sämann

Two years before this went up at the Paris Salon, revolution had swept across Europe and the streets of Paris had filled with the poor. So when visitors in 1850 met Millet's sower, a single farm laborer striding downhill and flinging seed, his face in shadow and his body nearly the height of the canvas, some read a threat in it. A peasant this large, this heroic, was usually a saint or a king. Critics split hard. One praised it as an energetic study full of movement, another dismissed the rough surface as trowel scrapings. Millet had grown up in a farming family in Normandy and knew the gesture from the inside. The seed leaving the sower's hand is barely visible, a scatter of dark flecks against the darkening field.