Death and the Woodcutter

Millet sent this to the Salon of 1859, and the jury turned it away. The subject came from an old fable by La Fontaine: a woodcutter, worn down under his load of brushwood, cries out for Death to take him, then flinches when Death actually arrives at his shoulder. In the years after the 1848 revolution, painting weary peasants at life size was read as a political act, and Millet's laborers unsettled the critics who preferred them picturesque. Here the old man twists away from the pale, winged figure reaching for him, his bundle spilling across the frozen ground. The picture found no buyer in Paris and eventually went north to Copenhagen, into a collection a brewing fortune had built.