The Gleaners is an 1857 painting by Jean-François Millet, now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It shows three poor peasant women bent over a harvested field, picking up the stray grain the reapers left behind. It is a painting about rural poverty.
Millet worked toward it for about ten years, and the Musée d'Orsay calls the canvas the culmination of that research. The museum says he gave the women "an emblematic value free of any hint of miserabilism." Seen that way, the picture is a tribute.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The Salon of 1857 did not see a tribute.
The canvas hung at the Palais des Champs-Élysées as number 1936. The critic Paul de Saint-Victor wrote that Millet's "three gleaners have gigantic pretensions, they pose as the Three Fates of Poverty," and he complained of "their ugliness and their grossness unrelieved." Another critic saw in the picture the scaffolds of 1793, the guillotines of the Terror.
Millet had painted no pike, no barricade, no flag. The Revolution of 1848 was less than ten years old, and the Salon's visitors still read the poor through that memory. I think the critics saw something real that later admirers softened: the picture makes poverty hard to look at.
What were the gleaners allowed to take?
Only what the reapers had missed, and only the poorest were supposed to take it. Gleaning was an old right of the rural poor, and it had a famous model in the Book of Ruth, where a widow gathers grain behind the harvesters in a field that is not hers.
The art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon notes that in Millet's time French law let the agrarian poor in special need, through age, illness or a financial setback, follow the harvest and collect the grain left behind.
That right was under pressure. A scholarly study of Balzac and Millet calls gleaning one of the most contested customary rights of nineteenth-century France, with landowners working to bring it under their control. Balzac's novel Les Paysans set out to undermine its legitimacy.
The three women are not begging. They are using a right, and in 1857 that right was already being worn away.
What You'll Discover
What separates them from the harvest.
Who the man on the horse is.
What the three bent backs show.
What Millet was paid for it.