#33 The Gleaners — Mug

Millet painted the poorest women in rural France at a scale normally reserved for generals and saints — three figures bent over a field, collecting the scraps left behind after the harvest. Critics read it as political agitation and attacked it; one called it a portrait of "the scaffolds of 1793". It hung under that suspicion for decades before anyone was willing to see it simply as three tired women working. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.