Woman with a Rake

Woman with a Rake, painted in 1856 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to Millet's core group of mid-1850s works depicting women engaged in field labour — a period of sustained artistic focus following his breakthrough with The Sower and The Gleaners. The rake was a tool associated with the aftermath of harvest: gathering cut hay, turning it to dry, collecting straw. Here a single woman performs this task in an open field, the implement she carries larger than herself and defining the visual axis of the composition. Millet consistently depicted the tools of agricultural labour — hoe, rake, scythe, flail — with the same attentiveness he brought to the human figure, understanding that in the peasant world the tool and the body were in a constant dialogue of effort and resistance. The Metropolitan's canvas is an example of Millet's quiet masterpieces — works that never achieved the celebrity of The Gleaners or The Angelus but that demonstrate his unfailing ability to make a single figure with a single task feel monumental and significant.

Millet positioned the woman against a low horizon and an expansive sky, giving her and her long-handled rake a vertical emphasis that makes both figure and tool read against the landscape like a standing stone. The warm ochre field and cool blue-grey sky establish the simple tonal contrast that frames the composition.