Jean François Millet

Millet’s famed oil painting The Gleaners (1857, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) is one of a small handful of nineteenth-century paintings that have proven truly unforgettable. Its commanding power derives in equal measure from the artist’s deeply felt concern for the plight of his laboring neighbors and from his hardwon success in matching the figures and gestures of his principal characters to the weight of the story they must tell.  By the time Millet exhibited The Gleaners in 1857, the composition had developed in his mind over nearly seven years and more than two dozen drawings - sketches, figure studies and a series of finished drawings building and reshaping the essential composition of the final image. The present drawing, Les Glaneuses, is the largest of the finished drawings in that progression, and it marks the significant moment when Millet recognized the impact of having one gleaner twist her arm behind her, to press against her straining back as she struggled across the harvested field.

Gleaning was a traditional right that allowed the poorest members of a community to gather and keep for themselves any blades of grain left behind by the communal harvesters. But in Millet’s day, this age-old practice, lauded in the Old Testament, was increasingly under attack across France, as commercial farmers consolidated small land-holdings into industrial scale operations. The new landlords fought to free themselves from the mutual obligations and restrictions that had bound together smaller subsistence farmers for centuries, at the same time that their bigger, more efficient holdings required fewer workers and left large numbers unemployed and impoverished.

Millet had been pondering and drawing gleaning themes since shortly after his arrival in Barbizon in 1849. A scene of gleaners is included among the early series of drawings, L’Èpopée des Champs, which formed a kind of catalogue for the field and forest subjects that would compel Millet’s attention throughout the next twenty-five years; and in 1852, he provided a complicated gleaning composition (Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum) as the basis for a magazine illustration etched by his friend Charles Jacque. The present drawing greatly simplifies that composition, giving the two gleaners a more monumental presence as well as individualized faces. The background of large grainstacks and a band of lunching harvesters is derived from Millet’s 1853 Salon painting Harvesters Resting (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), suggesting this drawing dates from 1852-53.

The particular power of Les Glaneuses flows from the changes Millet introduced in the second (right) figure of his gleaning pair, showing her gleaning with her left hand, thus extending her body into a single drawn-out gesture that conveys the forward movement she must sustain and contrasts with the more closed pose of the woman beside her. In raising the hand holding her small bounty of grain to press against her back, Millet simultaneously suggested her physical discomfort and opened up her youthful body to the viewer’s gaze. (The hand pressed against the gleaner’s back was introduced in a sheet of quick sketches in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; but there Millet still turned the faceless gleaner away.) The new position for the second gleaner introduced a contrast between the two women who had been mere repetitions of each other in Millet’s earlier gleaner drawings. Millet pushed those distinctions further, giving the second gleaner the softer features of a youthful face and muscular arms to accompany her trimmer figure and more energetic gesture. The first gleaner was characterized with the sharp chin and pointed nose with which Millet often indicated age, as well as a bony back beneath her dress. Implicit in this individualization of his gleaners was Millet’s new recognition that abject poverty now plagued the young and healthy as well as the oldest members of the farming community – the gleaners of more traditional imagery. 

We would like to thank Alexandra Murphy for kindly confirming the authenticity of this lot and for writing the catalogue entry.