The Gleaners (Des glaneuses) by Jean-François Millet was created in 1857. The painting is in Musee d’Orsay, Paris. The size of the work is 83,5 x 110 cm and is made as an oil on canvas.
True to one of Millet’s favourite subjects – peasant life – this painting is the culmination of ten years of research on the theme of the gleaners. These women incarnate the rural working-class. They were authorised to go quickly through the fields at sunset to pick up, one by one, the shafts of wheat missed by the harvesters.
The painter shows three of them in the foreground, bent double, their eyes raking the ground. He thus juxtaposes the three phases of the back-breaking repetitive movement imposed by this thankless task: bending over, picking up and straightening up again. (Read more in Musee d’Orsay)
About the Artist: French artist Jean-François Millet was born in Gruchy, Gréville-Hague. He was a French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his paintings of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the Realism art movement. In 1833 his father sent him to Cherbourg to study with a portrait painter named Bon Du Mouchel. By 1835 he was studying with Théophile Langlois de Chèvreville, a pupil of Baron Gros, in Cherbourg… Read more
You can order this work as an art print on canvas from canvastar.com
