Shearing Sheep

Early in 1853 the Paris weekly L'Illustration printed ten small wood engravings after drawings by Millet, a set called The Labours of the Fields, with a reaper, a haymaker, a woman breaking flax and others. One of them showed a woman shearing a sheep. That spring Millet sent the same subject, in paint, to the Salon, and this is the canvas. A man in a black hat holds the animal down across the top of a big barrel while she leans in with the hand shears, working close to its belly. The shorn side shows pale pink, and the cut fleece hangs over the rim of the barrel. Behind the paling on the left the rest of the flock waits its turn, under a thatched shelter in a farmyard. It is a small picture, about 40 centimetres tall. Hand shears like hers were the only way to do the job, and machine shearing did not arrive until the late 1880s.