The Gleaners

Gleaning was the old right of the poor to comb a field after harvest for the ears the reapers had left, and painters before Pissarro, above all Jean-Francois Millet, had turned it into a subject about rural poverty and endurance. Pissarro takes up the same bent figures here. He began the canvas in 1888 from a small squared-up study and found it slow going, building the surface from countless separate touches of pure colour, a painstaking method he had taken up in his late 50s. He worked at it for the better part of a year before finishing in 1889. The women stoop over the same stubble that gave the harvest, gathering what was left behind.