Das Warten

Millet showed this at the Paris Salon of 1861, and it irritated the critics. The subject comes from the Bible, the Book of Tobit: the aged parents Anna and Tobit waiting for their son Tobias, who has been gone for months to collect a debt in a distant town. What annoyed people was that Millet refused to set the story in an idealized Holy Land. He put it in a poor French village and gave the holy family the same weathered faces and heavy clothes as the peasants he painted out in the fields. Anna shades her eyes and stares down the road, while behind her the blind Tobit gropes his way out of the cottage, unable to see whether the boy is coming at all.