Jean-Francois Millet

Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) was one of the founders of the Barbizon School and was part the Realistic movement and Naturalism. He was a son of farmer and is known for painting the scenes of everyday farming life. Despite living with landscape painters of the Barbizon painter, he preferred to paint the ordinary lives of the peasant workers, showing their hardship in rural society and everyday life.

Millet’s painting ‘The Gleaners’ was received with shock by the Salon when it first emerged in 1857.  Similarly to many Courbets paintings, ‘The Gleaners’ was argued to be glorifying the lower-class workers. However, Miller paints ‘The Gleaners’ with sympathy, to remind that upper classes that French Society is built upon the lower working classes.

‘The Gleaners’ imagery of bending women has influenced many other arists such as Pissarro, Renoir and van Gogh. The Gleaners is one of Millet's best known works. Art historiean Robert Rosenblum says Millet’s painting introcuded “imposing new presnces in the reperoy of mid-century art, with wendless progency in city and country. Daumier’s and Degas’s laundresses, even more so Caillebotte’s floor-scrapers, are almost unthinkable without Millet’s epic hymn to labor’

Sources:
http://www.artrenewal.org/
http://www.jeanmillet.org/
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/millet_jean-francois.html