The Tired Gleaner

Jules Breton was the foremost chronicler of peasant life in the Artois countryside, and the gleaner was the subject that made his name: his monumental The Recall of the Gleaners won the Salon medal of 1859. Painted two decades later, The Tired Gleaner returns to the theme in a quieter key, showing a single harvester pausing from the fields around his native Courrières. Where Millet gave gleaners monumental gravity, Breton lent them a warm, dignified idealism that made him one of the most widely reproduced painters of the Third Republic.