Peasant Women with Brushwood

Millet painted this around 1852, a few years after the 1848 revolution had briefly promised France a republic, only for it to slide back toward empire. In those nervous years, painting poor country people at this scale and with this much seriousness struck some critics as almost a political act. Here two women trudge home through the forest of Fontainebleau at dusk, bent low under heavy bundles of brushwood they have gathered to sell as firewood. Their faces are barely visible. Millet, who lived among such people at the village of Barbizon, always said he was simply painting what was in front of him. A Russian count bought the picture, and after his death it passed to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, where it hangs now.