Farmer Inserting a Graft on a Tree

Grafting — inserting a cutting from one tree onto the rootstock of another to propagate desirable varieties — was a skilled agricultural technique practiced across French farming communities, and Millet's 1855 canvas depicts it with the same attentive dignity he brought to sowing, gleaning, and reaping. Now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich, the work shows a farmer at the precise, careful work of the graft, his hands performing a technical operation that required knowledge and patience. The choice of this subject reflects Millet's comprehensive survey of agricultural labor — he was interested not only in the heavy work of harvest and plowing but also in the more delicate skills of husbandry, the knowledge that was passed through generations and that represented the peasant community's accumulated practical wisdom. A farmer inserting a graft is engaged in an act of intervention in natural process, of human intelligence applied to the vegetable world. Millet renders this without romanticizing it, as a working operation performed by a working person.

The composition focuses tightly on the farmer and tree, with the grafting operation providing the composition's central event. Millet renders the hands and tree with particular care, since the technical operation demands legible specificity. The background landscape is handled more loosely as foil.