When I feature a painting on this channel, it’s often visually striking.
The kind of painting that makes you want to know more about it, that inspires curiosity.
This week’s painting doesn’t do that, at least not to me. However, though it looks like a simple,
serene rural painting, an art critic in the conservative journal Le Figaro
would say that he saw in this artwork “brewing riots and the return of the 1793 gallows”. He
hated this painting for its strong social commentary.
How did this seemingly boring painting enrage French conservatives,
bourgeois and aristocrats of the 19th century? Let’s look at Jean-Francois Millet’s The Gleaners.
It’s a painting of hard-working peasants, three women more specifically.
They’re all crouched differently: The first one is scanning for corn,
the second is picking the corn and the third is looking for a place to glean.
Gleaning was a right given to impoverished French peasants and it’s, in a nutshell,
gathering scraps after a field was harvested. Once a farmer collected his crops, gleaners
would clean the field behind them, keeping the leftover crops that weren’t harvested.
It would be really easy to see this painting as simply an hommage to rural
workers of the 19th century. For a very long time, and still today,
reproductions of this painting hang in various households, especially in France’s countryside,
and are seen as almost a glorification of French peasant life.
However, when this painting was first exhibited in 1857, it was shocking. Why?
To answer that question, we need to go less than 10 years back in time, in 1848,
at a time of social upheaval in France and Europe.
The Communist Manifesto was published, monarchies were being toppled, the ideas
of democracy, republicanism and liberalism were being spread and were getting traction.
France had its fair share of political turmoil and revolutions, from the 1789 First Republic,
to the 1804 First Empire, to the Restauration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1830,
the 1848 revolution that brought the Second Republic and, finally, the 1852 Second Empire.
The values of democracy, liberty, equality and solidarity were in the air. Some people
fought against them, some fought for their promotion in various degrees.
So what’s so problematic about this painting?
France, though we might not remember it as such, was, by a large majority,
still a rural country going through the19th century. French peasants represented an
incredibly large class of the population and, unsurprisingly, an impoverished one.
And nothing is more threatening to bourgeois and aristocrat privilege than
an impoverished class representing the majority of the population, especially if you had claimed
a couple of years earlier that you were into liberty, equality and solidarity.
This was not perceived as an ode to labor, or to people who dedicate themselves to the land.
This was seen as a representation of poverty.
Let’s look at this painting, not as an unbiased depiction of rural life, but as a class analysis.
The position and posture of the three women reveals both their condition and
their social position. If their positions reveal anything, it’s that their labour is backbreaking.
The hunched position can also allude to a subservient social position,
not only in the fact that they’re staring at the ground, but also in the fact that they
never break the horizon line. They’re encased in the bottom two thirds of the composition,
held down by a ceiling which, here, is the horizon line.
However, the most incisive element of this painting that has to do with class
is not necessarily in the peasants themselves,
but in the contrast between the peasants and the people above them in the social hierarchy.
Indeed, the subject of the painting isn’t the Gleaners in themselves, but the contrast between
the Gleaners and their background. That’s what made this painting controversial and that’s what
makes it relevant today. When the Figaro critic said he saw in the painting “brewing riots and
the return of the 1793 gallows”, he didn’t only say that because it was focusing on the
misery of the peasant class, but also because it contrasted it with the wealth of the upper class.
In the background of the Gleaners, you see literal mountains of crops while the
three women have a handful of them. The women live in a context of abundance,
you see this abundance behind them, yet they’re denied access to it and are given scraps.
This contrast is where the danger lies. Poverty can, and has always been presented as something
inevitable. It’s often presented as a natural fact by the bourgeoisie
and even hailed as a virtue by some religious authorities.
Millet, through this painting, is hinting at the cause of the women’s misery.
Their misery isn’t a natural fact, but the result of class division.
There is enough food for everybody, yet you need to scavenge for scraps. Why is that?
Even without a proper answer to that question, Millet is
asking the question and that, in itself, is dangerous enough to the privileged classes.
However, there might be a hint of an answer to that question
in the figure of the mounted man. This man is the only one not labouring.
He’s seated on his horse supervising the workers and making sure everything is in
order. We may be correct in assuming that this man, though he’s not even standing,
is making more money and more wealth than any of the workers who are actually harvesting.
The presence of this man might spark more questions: Why is he not working,
yet reaping more benefits than anyone else? Is it because he owns the land or represents
the landowner? Then why does the landowner gets to collect the benefits of our labour? How is
it possible that we live in misery while we, at the same time, create the wealth of this nation?
This painting was a scandal, it was despised for asking these questions.
I love the image of the fear of the gallows from that one Figaro critic,
which wasn’t uncommon. The backlash to the Gleaners was not only an admittance of
guilt from the bourgeoisie, but also an admittance of fear of the lower class.
And if this painting can be remembered for anything,
that’s what I’d like it to remembered for. Not as a rustic rural scene from rural France,
not a quiet peaceful group portrait of workers, but as an icon of bourgeois fear. I want the
Gleaners to be remembered as the painting that made the exploiters fear popular uprising. I want
the Gleaners to remind us where real power lies. Power is not the man on the horse,
real power is the three women in the foreground and their husbands and their children and their
communities. Real power is what the bourgeoisie fears and this image revealed us just that.