Standing Spinner

Among Millet's earliest memories, the Boston museum says, were sounds from inside the family house at Gruchy, the women spinning and carding wool. Here a young woman in a red bodice and a long grey apron stands at a great wheel, the tall wooden wheel used for spinning wool. She keeps it turning with one hand and with the other draws the fibre out at arm's length into a thread. Tufts of white wool lie on the bench, and more waits in a basket underneath. On a wheel like this the spinner works on her feet. She steps back from the spindle as the wheel turns, to stretch and twist the yarn, then steps forward again to wind it on, and back again, all day. The museum dates the canvas only broadly, to the first half of the 1850s. Behind her, grain sacks are heaped against the wall.