The Beakful

The French title, La Becquée, means the beakful, the mouthful a mother bird carries back to the nest. Millet meant it exactly. A peasant woman sits in the doorway of her cottage spooning soup to three small children lined up on the threshold like fledglings, their mouths open, while in the garden behind them the father digs the ground that feeds them all. Millet had been working the idea up from drawings since about 1848, when revolution swept France and rural poverty was a live political subject. He gives these ordinary field labourers the gravity usually reserved for religious scenes. He painted the finished canvas in 1860, and some of the drawings he made working toward it are kept in the same museum in Lille.