Potato Planters

At the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris, Millet had nine paintings on the walls of the French fine-art section, and this was one of them. The Gleaners hung there too, and The Angelus, and the jury gave him a first-class medal. Potato Planters had been painted about six years earlier and had already been through his dealers' hands, so for the exhibition it was lent by its Paris owner, a Monsieur Soultzener. A man and a woman work their way across a bare field in spring. He swings a hoe into the earth to open a hole, and she stands bent beside him with her apron gathered up full of seed potatoes, tossing one in. Behind them the flat plain is just turning green. The Boston museum notes that a donkey and a sleeping child beside a working couple may call to mind the Holy Family, and both are here, under the tree at the left, the donkey grazing and the child asleep by a wicker basket.