This is Jean-Francois Millet's
Gleaners painting. It's the work that
really shows his empathy
with rural laborers in particular
he really wanted to, I think, to stress
their dignity.
What he's showing here is a group of
gleaners. Gleaners were women who
picked up the wheat that was left after
the harvest.
So you see the harvest in the background
has taken place, these women are
picking up the ears and stalks of wheat
that are left over afterwards.
At this moment this was
actually a threatened activity.
For the first time in centuries
landowners were actually starting to
charge for the right to glean, so this activity
is actually a threatened one. At the time that the women are actually doing it.
What i love about this painting
is that Millet represents these women
as i say with
a real sense of kind of gravitas
and he enobles them,  you can see the way in which
their forms kind of echo across the
picture space. These women are leaning
over but this figure is just standing up just for a moment to rest.
But this is a painting that speaks
to Millet's empathy for the rural working
class in France.
