Man with a Hoe

Jean-François Millet, the painter of the Barbizon school who devoted his career to the life of the French peasantry, first exhibited this image of a vineyard labourer at the Paris Salon, where it became one of the most debated pictures of the century. The canvas was painted between 1860 and 1862, in the years when the artist was completing the great series of peasant themes that began with *The Gleaners*, and it shows the stooped worker resting on his hoe in the hard heat of noon — a figure read by contemporaries as either a noble emblem of rural toil or a political accusation against the conditions of the fields. The unsparing light and the exhausted posture of the labourer made the picture the subject of Edwin Markham’s famous poem and secured its place as the manifesto of the French naturalist school. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.