Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz)

The Salon that opened in Paris on 15 May 1853 was the first since Louis-Napoleon had made himself emperor, and Millet sent this canvas to it after working on it from 1850, longer than on any other picture of his. He had started from the Book of Ruth, the poor widow who gleans in the field of the farmer Boaz and is welcomed by him at the reapers' meal. Poussin, one of the painters Millet most revered, had told the same story in his Summer, which hangs in the Louvre. By the time of the Salon, Millet had taken the biblical names out of the title. The haystacks are those of the plain of Chailly, at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. On the left a young woman in blue clutches the little sheaf she has gleaned, and the man in the straw hat leading her in by the arm is, as the Boston museum reads him, a sharecropper hired to work a rich man's land. The reapers have sat down in a ring by the stacks to eat, a jug passing from hand to hand and their sickles dropped in the stubble. The jury gave Millet a second-class medal for it, the first official honour of his career.