Der Weg zur Arbeit

Millet moved out to the village of Barbizon, at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, in 1849, partly to escape a cholera outbreak in Paris, and he stayed there for the rest of his life. Going to Work comes from around 1850, one of his first Barbizon pictures. A man and a woman walk out to the fields at the start of the day, tools in hand, heads down, the flat plain stretching behind them. This was painted just after the revolution of 1848, when the labouring poor had become a charged political subject, and Millet gave these two the weight and stillness of figures in an old religious painting. He returned to the composition more than once in later years, in paint and in etching.