Les Botteleurs de foin

Millet showed this at the Paris Salon of 1850, and some who saw it were alarmed. France was two years past the revolution of 1848, the monarchy gone and the propertied classes still nervous, and here on a Salon wall were farm labourers made large and serious, a man bent over his pitchfork in a blue smock, two women beside him bundling hay in the heat. Peasants were rarely painted at this scale and with this gravity, a size usually kept for saints and generals. To some viewers it read as a threat, realism as a kind of provocation. Millet had grown up in a farming family in Normandy and knew the work from the inside. The hay had to be gathered fast, timed against the coming rain, and the picture holds these three in that pressed, unglamorous middle of the job.