Women Gathering Brushwood

In France in the early 1850s, the fallen wood in a state forest was not simply there for the taking. The Forest Code of 1827 had trimmed back the old village rights of use, and gathering deadwood survived only as a narrow, policed concession. Court records of those decades are full of forest offences brought against the very poor. The two women here are doing that work, walking home with bundles of brushwood roped to their backs, and the museum's own title calls them charcoal burners. The Pushkin Museum points out that Millet left no sky in the picture at all and set the view slightly above the figures, so the whole weight of the load presses down inside the frame. The canvas is small, 37 by 45 centimetres, and it came to the museum from the Tretyakov Gallery, where it had arrived with the French paintings collected by Sergei Tretyakov.