The Sheepshearers

Three women bend and reach over a closely shorn sheep, their hands busy with the shears and the wool, while a fourth looks on — a modest rural task rendered with the grave, monumental dignity that was Millet’s signature. Jean François Millet painted the little panel about 1857 to 1861, in the years when the peasant subjects he had made famous at Barbizon were beginning to draw hostile political readings in Paris, and he kept the picture small and quiet, the muted earth colours and the close, almost tactile attention to the women’s hands and muslin sleeves speaking of labor without rhetoric. The sheepshearing itself, a seasonal rite of the pastoral year, had been a favourite subject of French and Dutch painters for centuries; Millet’s version, with its solemn air and its refusal of any anecdote beyond the work itself, is among the most restrained and moving of them. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.