A woman baking bread

In rural France in the 1850s, bread was baked at home, usually once a week, in a wood-fired brick oven that took hours to reach heat. That is the moment Millet painted in 1854. A woman stands with her back to us, sliding a loaf into the oven on a long wooden peel. The only strong light is the glow from the oven's mouth, which throws her dark shape forward, and the only strong colour is the red sash at her waist. We never see her face. That was Millet's habit with laboring figures, letting the gesture carry the picture rather than the person, so the plain act of loading the oven becomes the entire subject. The painting hangs today in the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands, which also holds the world's second-largest collection of Van Gogh, a painter who revered Millet and spent years copying his scenes of peasant work.