Today we celebrate the dignity of labor – The Women of the Fields.
The Gleaners The Gleaners (Des glaneuses) is an oil painting by Jean-François Millet completed in 1857. It is held in the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris.
It depicts three peasant women gleaning a field of stray stalks of wheat after the harvest. The painting is famous for featuring in a sympathetic way what were then the lowest ranks of rural society; it was received poorly by the French upper classes.
Millet’s The Gleaners was preceded by a vertical painting of the image in 1854 and an etching in 1855. Millet unveiled The Gleaners at the Salon in 1857. It immediately drew negative criticism from the middle and upper classes, who viewed the topic with suspicion: one art critic, speaking for other Parisians, perceived in it an alarming intimation of “the scaffolds of 1793.”
Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker. To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of socialism. The depiction of the working class in The Gleaners made the upper classes feel uneasy about their status. The masses of workers greatly outnumbered the members of the upper class. This disparity in numbers meant that if the lower class were to revolt, the upper class would be overturned. With the French Revolution still fresh in the minds of the upper classes, this painting was not perceived well.
The painting illustrated a realistic view of poverty and the working class. One critic[1] commented that “his three gleaners have gigantic pretensions, they pose as the Three Fates of Poverty…their ugliness and their grossness unrelieved.”
[1] French author and art critic Paul de Saint Victor. It’s too late to chop off his head, but should you find yourself in Paris with a full bladder, may we recommend….
Our Lady of the Fields (Italian: Madonna dei Campi; French: Notre Dame des Champs; Spanish: La Virgen del Campo; also known as Our Lady of Prayer) is a title of Mary mother of Jesus in Roman Catholic Marian veneration. The name is based on a sanctuary in the countryside of Stezzano, near Bergamo, where Marian apparitions have been recorded since the 13th century.
Veneration of Mary under this name was taken to Canada by Jesuit Xavier Donald Macleod, who reports a Marian apparition in a village of New France in 1841.
Mary is venerated under this name by the Glenmary Home Missioners, a Catholic society of priests and brothers that serve the rural United States.
Wikipedia / Photo: The sanctuary of the Madonna dei Campi at Stezzano By Luigi Chiesa – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
Victor Cervantes
‘Nuestra Señora de los Campos’
‘Our Lady of the Fields’
Pajaro Valley Arts has an on-line gallery honoring Campesinos: Workers of the Land.
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Paris
Image credits:
L’église Notre Dame des Champs à Paris, vue depuis le boulevard Montparnasse. By Ralf.treinen – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19517583
“Life of the Virgin” by Joseph Aubert (over the choir) By Delfin Le Dauphin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107019345
Elder G helps us celebrate the Dignity of Labor / The Women of the fields.
