The Gleaners

When Millet showed this at the Paris Salon of 1857, well-off visitors found it unsettling, and one critic claimed to see in it the shadow of the guillotines of 1793. That reaction tells you how raw the subject still was. France had had a revolution just nine years earlier, in 1848, and the propertied classes were nervous about anything that made the rural poor look heroic. Gleaning was the very bottom of country life, the legal right of the poorest women to pick over a field after the harvest for the stray stalks the reapers had left. Millet painted three of them bent to that work, and he painted them at the grand size usually saved for saints or generals. Far behind, sunlit, sits a fat harvest with its stacks and a mounted overseer, a whole comfortable world these three women will never straighten up to join.