Editing Jean-François Millet (section)

====''The Gleaners''====
{{main|The Gleaners}}
[[Image:Jean-François Millet - Gleaners - Google Art Project 2.jpg|thumb|right|''[[The Gleaners]]'', 1857. [[Musée d'Orsay]], Paris.]]
This is one of the most well known of Millet's paintings, ''[[The Gleaners]]'' (1857). While Millet was walking the fields around Barbizon, one theme returned to his pencil and brush for seven years—[[gleaning]]—the centuries-old right of poor women and children to remove the bits of grain left in the fields following the harvest. He found the theme an eternal one, linked to stories from the Old Testament. In 1857, he submitted the painting ''The Gleaners'' to the Salon to an unenthusiastic, even hostile, public.

(Earlier versions include a vertical composition painted in 1854, an etching of 1855–56 which directly presaged the horizontal format of the painting now in the [[Musée d'Orsay]].<ref>Murphy, p. 103.</ref>)

A warm golden light suggests something sacred and eternal in this daily scene where the struggle to survive takes place. During his years of preparatory studies, Millet contemplated how best to convey the sense of repetition and fatigue in the peasants' daily lives. Lines traced over each woman's back lead to the ground and then back up in a repetitive motion identical to their unending, backbreaking labor. Along the horizon, the setting sun silhouettes the farm with its abundant stacks of grain, in contrast to the large shadowy figures in the foreground. The dark homespun dresses of the gleaners cut robust forms against the golden field, giving each woman a noble, monumental strength.