The Gleaners

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The Gleaners
(French: Des glaneuses)
Jean-François Millet, 1857
Oil on canvas
83.5 × 110 cm, 33 × 44 in
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The Gleaners (Des glaneuses) is an oil painting by Jean-François Millet composed in 1857. It depicts three peasant women gleaning a field of stray grains of wheat after the harvest. The painting is famous for monumentalizing what were then the lowest ranks of rural society. The painting was received poorly by the French upper class.

[edit] History

Millet first unveiled The Gleaners at the Salon in 1857. It immediately drew negative criticism from the middle and upper classes, who viewed the topic with suspicion: one art critic, speaking for other Parisians, perceived in it an alarming intimation of "the scaffolds of 1793."[1] Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker.[1] To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism and the dangerous voices of Karl Marx and Émile Zola.[2]

One critic commented that "his three gleaners have gigantic pretensions, they pose as the Three Fates of Poverty…their ugliness and their grossness unrelieved."[3] While the act of gleaning was not a new topic—representations of Ruth had already been composed—this new work was a statement on rural poverty and not Biblical piety:[3] there is no touch of the Biblical sense of community and compassion in Millet's contrast of the embodiments of grinding poverty in the foreground and the rich harvest in the sunlit distance beyond. The implicit irony was unsettling. After the Salon, Millet, short on money, sold his piece for 3,000 francs—below his asking price of 4,000,[4] haggling with an Englishman named Binder who would not budge for his meagre counter-offer; Millet tried to keep the miserable price a secret.[5] While The Gleaners garnered little but notoriety during his life, after his death in 1875, public appreciation of his work steadily broadened. In 1889, the painting sold for 300,000 francs at auction.[4] The following year it was donated to the State and now resides in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

[edit] Composition

What does The Gleaners show? [The women] embody an animal force deeply absorbed by a painstaking task. The contrast between wealth and poverty, power and helplessness, male and female spheres is forcefully rendered.
— Liana Vardi[6]

The Gleaners features three peasant women prominently in the foreground, stooping to glean the last scraps of a wheat harvest. Their gaze does not meet the viewer, and their faces are obscured. In the background, bountiful amounts of wheat are being stacked while a landlord overseer stands watch on the right. Millet has chosen to center the women and paint them with a greater contrast. The earthy figures blend into the color of the piece, ingraining them well into the scene.


[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Kimmelman, Michael (August 27, 1999), “ART REVIEW; Plucking Warmth From Millet's Light”, The New York Times (New York City), <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E07E2DC143BF934A1575BC0A96F958260>. Retrieved on 10 January 2008 
  2. ^ Kleiner, Fred; Christian J. Mamiya (2005). Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 12, California: Wadsworth/Thompson Learning, 857. ISBN 0-534-64091-5. 
  3. ^ a b Story behind the picture - The Gleaners. University of St. Andrews. Retrieved on 2008-01-10.
  4. ^ a b Fratello, Bradley (December 2003). "France embraces Millet: the intertwined fates of The Gleaners and The Angelus". The Art Bulletin 85 (4): 685–701. doi:10.2307/3177365. 
  5. ^ Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, Millet racconté par lui-même, (Paris: 1921)
  6. ^ Vardi, Liana (December 1993). "Construing the Harvest: Gleaners, Farmers, and Officials in Early Modern France". The American Historical Review 98 (5): 1424–1447. doi:10.2307/2167061.