Beggars and the Poor in Painting: 12 Works
Beggars and the poor were painted for four centuries, and almost never by themselves. Velazquez gave a water seller the gravity of a saint, Rembrandt drew himself as a beggar, and Van Gogh spent years trying to paint peasants who did not look picturesque. Twelve works and who they were really for.
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One painter etched himself in rags, sitting on the ground, for no client at all.
One water seller in a torn coat was painted with more dignity than most kings of the period.
One canvas of peasants eating was called too dark to sell by the painter’s own brother, who was his dealer.
Murillo sold beggar boys to rich northern collectors who found poverty charming from a distance.
And one painting of gleaners frightened the French bourgeoisie enough to be called political.
1 | The Waterseller of Seville, Diego Velazquez (about 1620)
An old man in a torn cloak hands a glass of water to a boy. A drop of water hangs on the side of the jug. Nothing about the composition says poor.
Velazquez was about 21 and painting street sellers as if they were philosophers, which is exactly what he did later with court dwarfs. I go into his whole story in Diego Velazquez.
2 | The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh (1885)
Five peasants eat under one lamp, hands enormous, faces knotted. Van Gogh wanted the viewer to smell bacon, smoke and potato steam, and said so in a letter.
His brother Theo, who sold paintings for a living, told him it was too dark to sell. Vincent considered it his first real picture. More on him in Vincent van Gogh.
3 | The Gleaners, Jean Francois Millet (1857)
Three women bend to pick leftover grain, an ancient right of the poorest. Behind them, a full harvest they will never own.
Critics read it as a threat and called it the three fates of poverty. Millet insisted he was painting work. His effect on Van Gogh is in How Millet Shaped Van Gogh.
4 | The Beggars, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1568)
Five disabled men in fox tails and paper crowns on a courtyard floor, painted on a panel smaller than a sheet of paper.
Historians still argue whether it shows a carnival, a leper hospital or a political satire. The rest of his life is in Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
5 | Rembrandt as a beggar (1630)
Rembrandt etched himself seated on a bank in rags, mouth open, hand out. He was 24, already successful, and nobody commissioned it.
He made around 80 self portraits across his life and this is the strangest. I cover him properly in Rembrandt.
6 | Murillo’s beggar boys (1650s)
Barefoot children eating grapes and melon, dirty and grinning, painted in Seville and bought almost entirely by foreign collectors.
Poverty made charming enough to hang in a drawing room. Seville was recovering from a plague that killed nearly half the city.
7 | The Third Class Carriage, Honore Daumier (about 1862)
A nursing mother, a sleeping boy and an old woman on a wooden bench, painted at the level of the bench rather than looking down.
Daumier had been jailed for a caricature and never stopped taking sides. His full story sits in Honore Daumier.
8 | The Stone Breakers, Gustave Courbet (1849)
An old man and a boy break rocks for a road, faces turned away, at the scale of history painting. Courbet said he had met them and invited them to pose.
The painting was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945 and survives only in photographs. I go into his whole story in Gustave Courbet.
9 | The Angelus, Jean Francois Millet (1859)
Two peasants stop work to pray at the sound of a distant bell. It became one of the most reproduced images in France.
Dali was obsessed with it and claimed the basket was originally a child’s coffin. An X ray later showed a painted over shape underneath, which settled nothing.
10 | The Ragpicker and Manet’s outsiders (1860s)
Manet painted an absinthe drinker and a ragpicker at full length, the format reserved for aristocrats. The Salon rejected the drinker in 1859.
Putting a street figure in a nobleman’s frame was the provocation. More on him in Edouard Manet.
11 | Gin Lane, William Hogarth (1751)
A drunken mother lets her baby fall while a pawnbroker does good business. Hogarth printed it cheaply on purpose so the people it depicted could buy it.
It was propaganda for the Gin Act, and it worked. The rest of his life is in William Hogarth.
12 | The Poor Poet, Carl Spitzweg (1839)
A writer in bed under an umbrella because the roof leaks, burning his own manuscripts for heat. It is funny until you look at the room.
Germany made it a national favourite, which says something about how the poor are easier to love in a comedy.
Who these pictures were really for
Which one does everyone recognise? The Gleaners by Millet and The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh.
Why did rich collectors buy beggar paintings? Distance. Murillo’s ragged children were charming in a Dutch or English drawing room in a way real poverty was not.
Was The Gleaners political? Critics thought so. Millet denied it, but gleaning was a legal right of the poorest and the painting made that visible.
Did Rembrandt really draw himself as a beggar? Yes, in a 1630 etching, seated in rags with his hand out. It was not a commission.
Which museums hold them? Orsay for Millet, the Van Gogh Museum for the Potato Eaters, the National Gallery for Murillo and the Met for Daumier.
A last number, and it says everything: The Angelus sold for 553,000 francs in 1889 in a bidding war between France and America, at a time when a farm labourer of the kind it shows earned a few hundred francs a year.