The Weed Burner

Around 1859 or 1860 Millet was living at Barbizon, a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and painting the farm work he saw in the fields around it. This canvas is small, 38 centimetres tall, and it shows one of the plainest jobs of the year. A peasant woman in a pink cap and grey apron leans on a pitchfork and watches a heap of dry weeds smoulder at her feet, while the white smoke drifts off to the left. Burning dead growth was a way of clearing ground before it was worked again, and the Louvre catalogues the scene under preparing the soil. The picture came to the museum in 1902 with the bequest of the collector Georges Thomy Thiéry. In 2017 the novelist Marie-Hélène Lafon published a short book about this one canvas, inventing possible lives for the woman in the smoke.