Man with a Hoe

Man with a Hoe, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum, was shown at the Salon of 1863 and became one of the most politically charged paintings of the Second Empire. The figure — a peasant laborer pausing to lean upon his hoe, his body bent and face vacant with exhaustion — struck critics as either a dignified image of rural virtue or a disturbing symbol of dehumanised toil, depending on the political disposition of the viewer. Conservative critics feared its implications: here was a man reduced almost to the level of the earth he worked, and Millet declined to frame the image in any consoling way. The American poet Edwin Markham later wrote a poem of the same name directly inspired by the painting, imagining the figure as the emblem of exploited labour worldwide. Millet himself resisted programmatic political readings, insisting that he painted what he saw and felt in the Barbizon fields. But the work's power comes precisely from its refusal of sentiment: the man does not look up at the viewer, does not assume a heroic posture, does not inhabit the picturesque. He simply rests, momentarily, in a field that will demand more of him than it will ever give.

Millet positioned the figure in the middle ground against an open landscape, giving him room to breathe while denying him any ennobling frame. The palette is uniformly sombre — raw umber, grey-green, pale sky — and the paint handling is deliberately unrefined, the brushwork matching the roughness of the subject.