The Gleaners

Three peasant women bend low across a stubbled field, gathering by hand the few stray stalks of grain left after the harvest, their broad backs and worn hands monumental against the golden expanse, a rich farm and overseer small in the distance. Jean-Francois Millet paints these gleaners - among the rural poor, allowed only the scraps - with grave, sculptural dignity. Now in the Musee d'Orsay, the Gleaners unsettled bourgeois viewers by giving heroic weight to the lowliest labor, a quiet but pointed image of poverty, toil, and the hard arithmetic of the land.