Jean-François Millet, 1857, Oil On Canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
August can be brutally hot, whether dry or humid! Looking at The Gleaners I feel the suffocation of August heat. But more emphatically, I feel the physical pain of these three women picking up the tiny bits of grain that remain after a field has been harvested.
The Gleaners depicts three peasant women gleaning wheat at sunset. Millet portrays these workers in a very real and sympathetic light, communicating through this oil painting the exhausting work poor agricultural laborers had to do to survive in mid-1800s France. He took what his society at that time considered the lowest ranks in rural life and elevated them through art to a status equal to the middle and upper classes. Feeling threatened by this, the prosperous classes in France did not appreciate Millet’s painting when he unveiled it.
Millet was an integral part of the Realism art movement where the focus was on portraying scenes truthfully. Having grown up on a farm he neither romanticized country life nor hid it from view. He knew firsthand what it meant to be an integral part of a farming community working the fields. In The Gleaners Millet aptly portrays an everyday scene of people struggling to survive. Gleaning was a practice landowners allowed the poor to do once their rich harvests had been collected. High society may have looked down on gleaning, but Millet brought out the dignity of the gleaners and the life-and-death seriousness of their work.
The colors of the field and sky are soft and muted, yet a golden hue reflects the sacredness of the land. The abundant harvest is seen in the background, along with the a field supervisor on horseback and laborers standing around. The gleaners, however, ignore the bounty in the distance. Their attention is fully upon the task at hand.
These workers emanate genuineness. Engrossed in the backbreaking work of locating and gathering meager leftovers, the three women keep close to each other in their solitary work, remaining removed from the rest of the scene.
By placing the women in the foreground, making them large and substantial, Millet has turned the gleaners that society preferred to ignore into the focus of attention. While their work clothes are dusty, colorful accents help them stand out.
The Gleaners was received poorly when it debuted. People did not like having poverty stare back at them in art salons. Eventually sentiment changed; by the late 1800s The Gleaners began to cultivate recognition and appreciation.
Have you ever had to do work that others looked down upon or did not appreciate? Perhaps one of the lessons of The Gleaners is that there is no shame in doing what we must to survive. All work matters. Dignity and nobility exist in all walks of life, and we can be proud of the work we do regardless of what others may think.