箕をふるう男

The Salon of 1848 opened in Paris a few weeks after a revolution had turned out the king, and for once there was no jury, so more than 5,000 works went up on the walls. Millet sent in a man winnowing, shaking a basket of grain in a barn so the chaff flies off as dust. Ledru-Rollin, interior minister of the new republic, bought it for the state for 500 francs. That canvas is in London now. This panel is one of the smaller versions of the subject Millet painted, barely 39 centimetres high, with the same haze in the air and the same red cap, white shirt and blue trousers on the thresher, a combination nobody in 1848 would have read as accidental. It came to the Louvre in 1902 with the collection of Georges Thomy-Thiéry.