beside the easel

La paye des moissonneurs, 1882 Born July 31, 1844 in northern France, Léon Augustin Lhermitte was a French Realist painter. His work is characterized by rural scenes of peasant farmers much like his contemporaries such as Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton . Lhermitte, in contrast to these great painters, is lesser known yet his approach is more Classical and he had a much greater understanding of anatomy and body language. In the above painting, La paye des moissonneurs , translated as the pay of harvesters, peasant farmers are given a day's wages for hard work from their landowners. You can tell by the way the figures to the left are seated on a concrete bench how defeated and tired they are yet eager for their pay, a biting comment on labor that we can all understand today, even with our modern conveniences. The man on the left is seated with his giant scythe, staring into space while his wife breastfeeds their child as the owner pays them in coins. The younger bache...

The Gleaners, 1857 The icon of Barbizon and Naturalism (see my post on Breton ), Jean-François Millet was born October 4, 1814 in Northwestern France. Millet represents a triumph of political as well as artistic achievement in that he was among the very first to depict rural society with dignity and sympathy in their social rank, which was quite low. After the French Revolution society began to modernize and the rise of the middle-classes was a success in sharp contrast to the crushing poverty under the monarchy, and it seemed that society wanted to ignore their rural origins. Millet noticed how factories had changed the landscape of France and how less people lived in the countryside, leaving hard working peasants to toil in their fields. In The Gleaners , Millet depicts peasant women gleaning the last traces of a wheat harvest, faces downcast, and the meager remains are a scathing commentary on the poverty of the lower classes. In the distant background we see massive piles o...