Around 1848 -1875 · Barbizon, rural work, care and domestic life

Millet gives women in rural areas a monumentality without emphasis: milkmaid, shepherdess, gleaner or seamstress places her body in the concrete duration of work.

Born into a peasant family in Gruchy in 1814, Jean-François Millet knew agricultural work directly before his training in Cherbourg then in Paris. Installed in Barbizon in 1849, he made rural gestures the center of his art. Women work in the fields, guard the herds, carry the milk, sew, spin or feed the children. Clothing, tools and posture identify a specific task; the simplified outline and the low horizon nevertheless give these figures an almost monumental amplitude. Millet hides neither repetition nor fatigue. His solitary shepherdesses remain linked to the surveillance of the herd, and his interior scenes show that the work is continues after dusk. Des Glaneuses makes visible the poverty of those who collect the remains of the harvest while abundance accumulates far away. The dignity of these women is therefore born from observation, not from idealized pastoral care. The selection "Women of Jean-François Millet" notably compares Norman Dairy in Gréville and Shepherdess sitting in the shade. Its reading favors space.

In Millet, the female body does not adorn the countryside: it carries milk, wool, harvests and daily continuity.