Date: 10-07-2005
Owning Institution: The Louvre
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: 19th Century      

Tomorrow is the feast day of St Benedict of Narsia, patron saint of farm workers. So this week’s picture is Jean-Francois Millet’s celebrated depiction of mid-nineteenth-century agrarian labour at its harshest: The Gleaners. The picture was painted in 1857, and exhibited at the Paris Salon in the same year. It can be seen in the Louvre, in Paris.

 Millet shows three women, two of them bent almost to the ground by their labour, the third pausing, in a moment of exhaustion, to catch her breath. Behind them in the middle distance, some farm labourers are piling forkfuls of grain into a cart, while others build mounds of it into towering stacks. The harvesters toil under the watchful gaze of an overseer mounted on horseback. A flock of distant birds, speckling the honey-coloured sky, has gathered in the hope of finding some leftovers on which to feed. The women in the foreground of Millet’s painting have also come in search of leftovers. They are not harvesting, but gleaning, picking up the remnants left once the crop has been gathered. They reach down into the stubble of the shorn field for single stalks of wheat, to add to the meagre bunches they have already gathered into the improvised burlap sacks tied to their waists.

The right to glean was traditionally reserved for the most indigent members of rural society. In Millet’s time, French law specifically allowed for any member of the agrarian poor who might be in special need – whether through age or illness or some financial setback – to follow the harvest and collect whatever blades of grain might have been missed by the reapers’ sheaves. The painter emphasises the back-breaking, repetitive nature of the gleaners’ minimally rewarding labours, through the parallel gestures of the two stooping women. There is calculation on Millet’s part, too, in the pose of their companion. Even though she stands to rest, she remains hunched, so that her head does not break the line of the horizon. She seems earthbound, tied to the soil on which she depends for her meagre existence. The painter has composed his principal figures along a single diagonal line, which can be imagined to continue beyond the frame of the canvas. An entire agrarian underclass is implied by these three, anonymously dressed women.

Millet himself came from a family of moderately prosperous Norman farmers and used to remark that “I was born a peasant, and a peasant I shall remain”. He was also a learned and widely read man, who was drawn to paint subjects such as The Gleaners not only by fellow-feeling for those toiling in the fields, but also by his sense that they embodied an eternal aspect of the human condition. He wrote in his letters that when he saw peasants working he felt as though witnessing the same perennial labours described in the poetry of Virgil or the verses of the bible.

Gleaning had, indeed, been a common practice in organised societies since at least the days of the Old Testament. But before the mid-nineteenth century, gleaners had appeared infrequently in art. When they did it was almost always in the guise of figures enacting the Old Testament tale of Ruth and Boaz, a story of virtue rewarded. Millet departed from tradition in removing his own young scavengers, painted in modern dress, from the morally comforting context of a biblical parable. “It is never the cheerful side of things that appears to me,” Millet remarked. “I have never seen it.” He wanted, he said, to find, isolate and paint fragments of life as it was really lived by the rural poor. “I can clearly see … the sun streaming through the clouds, in all its glory, a long way off from the earth. I see just as clearly, out there in the plain, horse steaming as they plough; then, in a rocky place, a weary man, whose grunts have been audible since this morning, who is trying to straighten up a minute to catch his breath. The drama of these things has its splendours. It is no invention of mine, and the expression ‘the cry of the earth’ was coined long ago.”

Millet’s picture provoked controversy when it was first exhibited, at the Paris Salon of 1857. Memories of the Revolution of 1848 were fresh, and the spectre of 1789 still haunted the French imagination. Continued popular opposition to Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat of 1852 meant that in many people’s minds the image of the worker was associated with social upheaval. Jean Rousseau, writing in Le Figaro, saw behind The Gleaners – metaphorically if not actually – “the pikes of popular riots and the executioners’ scaffoldings of 1793”. Paul de Saint-Victor, in La Presse, described the figures as “scarecrows in rags” and as “the three Fates of pauperism.”

Millet himself disliked overt political interpretations of his work. He was a humanitarian rather than a polemicist. Likewise, his radicalism was humane and aesthetic rather than politically motivated, in the sense that he sought to overturn the academic Beaux-Arts hierarchy of subject matter – according to which only lofty themes drawn from the bible, from mythology, or from history were worthy of an artist’s serious attention. By painting three impoverished gleaners, and by giving them the monumental grandeur of classical statuary, Millet was declaring that even the most apparently humble and marginal lives can possess an innate dignity of their own. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, Millet’s friend, wrote a lengthy appreciation of The Gleaners which almost certainly reflects the way in which the painter himself wished his work to be seen:

“The modern artist has become convinced that a beggar lit by a ray of sun is in a truer condition of beauty than a king on his throne; that a team going out to plough under the clear and cold morning sky is, as a religious ceremony, equal to Jesus preaching on the mountain; that three peasants bent over, gleaning in the harvested field, while on the horizon, the master’s wagons groan under the weight of the grain, wring the heart more painfully than seeing all the instruments of torture visited upon a martyr. This canvas, which recalls frightful misery, is not, like some paintings of Courbet, a political harangue nor a social thesis: it is a very beautiful and simple work of art, free of all declaiming. The motif is poignant, as a matter of fact, but treated as frankness itself, it is raised above partisan passions and, removed from lies and exaggeration, reproduces one of the true and great texts of nature, like those discovered by Homer and Virgil.”