The Potato Harvest

Millet had left Paris in 1849 for Barbizon, a village at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, and spent the rest of his life painting the farm workers around him. He made this in 1855. It shows a plain moment in the fields between Barbizon and Chailly: a man tipping a basket of potatoes into a sack that a woman holds open, with full sacks and a cart beside them and more diggers behind. Nothing is idealised and no one is posed. In the nervous years after the 1848 revolution, such straightforward attention to poor labourers struck some viewers as a quiet political statement, though Millet always insisted he was simply painting what he saw. The American collector William Walters later carried the picture across the Atlantic to Baltimore, where it hangs today.