Jean-François Millet

The Gleaners shows three peasant women picking up leftover grain after a harvest. Millet exhibited the 1857 oil painting at the Paris Salon, and it is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Millet lived and worked in Barbizon, where artists painted rural life outside the academic Paris studio system. His focus was less picturesque landscape and more the dignity and hardship of agricultural workers.

Yes. Millet painted The Angelus in the late 1850s, showing a peasant couple pausing for prayer in a field. Like The Gleaners, it became one of the defining images of 19th-century rural labor.

Millet painted poor rural workers at a scale and seriousness usually reserved for historical or religious subjects. In the years after the 1848 Revolution, Salon viewers could read that attention to laborers as socially charged rather than merely pastoral.