La cucitrice

Millet is remembered for the grand, slow labour of the fields, the gleaners bent double after the harvest, the couple pausing to pray at evening. But he also kept painting the smaller work that filled a poor household indoors. Here a woman sits alone over her needle, head bowed to the cloth in her lap. Millet drew these scenes from his own home at Barbizon, near the forest of Fontainebleau, where he watched his wife and daughters sew and darn late into the evening. He gives the seamstress the same steady weight he gave the workers outside, the whole of her attention gone down into the small movement of her hands.