Three women bend over a field that has already been harvested. Behind them, small, on the right, a man sits on a horse. The Musée d'Orsay identifies him as the estate overseer, and part of his job was to see that the gleaners kept to the rules. Most people looking at the picture never find him.
Gleaning was a right, with conditions attached
The women are picking up the ears of corn the harvesters missed, one at a time. They were allowed to: the rule was that they could go through a cut field quickly, before sunset, and take what was left behind. Millet gives his three figures the three stages of a single movement — bend, pick up, straighten — so that one repetitive, back-breaking job is shown all at once. Behind them the harvest itself is enormous and cheerful: stacks, sheaves, a cart, a crowd of harvesters in golden dust. The change of scale between the foreground and that distance is abrupt, and the low sun makes the three women look carved. The man on the horse sits at the edge of the abundance, between them and the owners he answers to.
The scaffolds of 1793
It went to the Salon of 1857 as number 1936, and the prosperous classes disliked it. One critic saw in it the scaffolds of 1793 — the guillotine — nine years after the revolution of 1848 and in a decade when socialism was a live argument. Three bent women collecting leftovers had been painted at the size normally kept for generals and saints, and the size was the offence. Millet had been working at the gleaning subject for ten years by then. Short of money after the Salon, he asked four thousand francs for it, settled for three thousand with an Englishman named Binder, and kept the lower figure quiet. The suspicion stuck to the painting for decades before anyone was content to see three tired women at work.
Three thousand francs, then three hundred thousand
The banker Ferdinand Bischoffsheim owned it from 1867. At auction in 1889 it went for three hundred thousand francs, a hundred times what Millet had taken, and the buyer stayed anonymous for about a week. It turned out to be Jeanne Alexandrine Pommery, who ran the champagne house and whose finances were being gossiped about. In January 1890 the French state accepted the painting from her as a donation subject to usufruct — she kept the use of it, and then gave that up in the same year. It hung in the Louvre from 1890 until 1986, when it moved to the Musée d'Orsay, where it is now: eighty-three and a half centimetres by a hundred and ten, on the ground floor, in room five.
Three thousand francs in 1857, three hundred thousand in 1889. The man on the horse is still on the right, over the rim of the cup.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.