Buckwheat Harvest, Summer

By 1868 Jean-François Millet had spent most of his life short of money, painting farm workers around the village of Barbizon. That year a wealthy Alsatian industrialist, Frédéric Hartmann, commissioned him to paint the four seasons, and for summer Millet chose the buckwheat harvest. Buckwheat was the grain that grew on thin upland soil where wheat would not, the crop of a hard, poorer country. In the picture workers gather and beat the cut plants under a heavy, hazy sky, and off to the left a fire sends up a slow column of smoke, most likely weeds being burned off. Millet kept working on the set until his death in 1875, and left the winter canvas unfinished.