Woman Carding Wool

Carding is the step before spinning. Fleece comes off a sheep tangled and full of grit, so it is pulled between two paddles set with wire teeth until the fibres lie parallel and a spinner can use them. By 1856, the year on this canvas, machines in the wool mills of northern France were doing that work by the ton. In the villages the same job was still done by hand, indoors, mostly in winter, often as piecework for a merchant who paid by weight.

Millet gives it the format of an important picture. One figure alone on a narrow canvas about 90 centimetres high, treated with the care a Paris exhibition would have kept for a portrait or a scene from history.

He took up the same motif as an etching in these same years, and impressions of that print are now in museums from Brooklyn to Saint Louis.