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The Gleaners
Jean-François Millet · Realism & Academic
- Artist
- Jean-François Millet (1814–1875)
- Date
- 1857
- Dimensions
- 83.5 x 110 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France
The Gleaners shows three peasant women bent over a field after the harvest, picking up the stray ears of wheat left behind. Gleaning was a right granted to the poorest members of rural communities.
A closer look
The three women, solid and sculptural, occupy the foreground in a slow rhythm of bending, picking and rising. Behind them, in the golden distance, the plenty of the harvest is visible: huge haystacks, a loaded cart, many workers and a foreman on horseback overseeing them. The contrast between the women’s hard labour for scraps and the abundance of the estate disturbed some viewers at the 1857 Salon, who saw it as a political statement. Today it is admired for its quiet dignity.
History of the painting
When The Gleaners was shown at the Salon of 1857, conservative critics saw the three poor women as a political threat, a reminder of rural poverty. Millet sold the painting for a modest price, but its value rose steadily after his death. In 1889 Jeanne-Alexandrine Pommery, head of the Pommery champagne house in Reims, bought it for a very large sum and bequeathed it to the Louvre the following year; it moved to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.
