The rest of haymakers

After the revolution of February 1848 the new Republic handed out state commissions, and Millet got one through the painter Philippe-Auguste Jeanron, a friend who now ran the national museums. He was free to choose the subject and picked a grand biblical scene, Hagar and her son Ishmael cast out into the desert. He never finished it, and that canvas is now in The Hague. To honour a contract he had already been paid for, he sent this to the Salon of 1849 instead. Haymakers rest in the shade of a stack, while a woman stands drinking from a jug and cattle wait at the water's edge behind her. The state lent the picture out to its buildings, and it was hanging at the château of Saint-Cloud when the palace burned during the war with Prussia. The damaged canvas was cut down to a smaller size.