Woman Carding Wool (La Cardeuse)

Woman Carding Wool (La Cardeuse) of 1855, now in the Brooklyn Museum, depicts the preparatory stage of wool processing — drawing raw fibres across toothed paddles to align and clean them before spinning. Millet returned to this subject multiple times across his career, understanding carding as one of the key invisible labours of the peasant domestic economy that sustained the household through the winter. The Brooklyn Museum's version belongs to the same productive period as his other major depictions of interior female labour, demonstrating his consistent attention to the full range of tasks that structured peasant life. The subject also allowed him to work with specific material textures — the wool, the paddles, the rough fabric of the woman's clothing — that challenged and rewarded his technical skills in oil. The work entered American collections relatively early, reflecting the strong enthusiasm for Millet that developed in the United States from the 1860s onward, driven partly by the writings of critics who saw in his peasant subjects a democratic affirmation of honest labour.

The frontal or three-quarter positioning of the figure in close proximity to the picture plane is characteristic of Millet's interior work — an approach that creates a sense of direct, unmediated presence. Wool fleece and carding paddles receive close material attention, their specific textures rendered through differentiated brushwork.