(piano music) Man" We're looking at
a Jean-Francois Millet painting The Gleaners from 1857. Now this is a painting that
hangs in the Musee d'Orsay. It's an oddly soft painting. Woman: The colors are muted. The edges are soft of the figures. Man: And the brush is not tight, right? There's no hard lines. Woman: That's true. Strangely or perhaps ironically the
subject that is depicted is very harsh. These three women are gleaners, which means that they are going out
into the field after the harvest and basically picking up the leftovers of corn in this case that have fallen. They're basically rural beggers
and this is a very old tradition. Man: So you can see that
actually very clearly. You can see the great grain
stacks in the distance and you can see a grain [?]
or wagon really piled high. You can see the main, I almost
want to say army of harvesters in the distance all bent over
in this back-breaking work. You can see the large bundles of
grain that have been gathered. But then in the foreground at some
real distance from the main enterprise, you see these three
women working in a kind of solitary way and one
imagines their destitution. They are trying to feed their families. You can see the small
bundles to their right that they have gathered as they
clutch what they have found. Woman: Yeah, very, very small
compared to the enormous harvest that has been yielded in the background. Man: You can also really
make out the hierarchy. It's interesting because
these women are large and substantial and in
the foreground and clearly in that sense important monumentally even. But in a diminished scale,
because they're far away, we have again the main enterprise
and we have the people working, but then we have what seems to
be a supervisor on horseback overseeing that operation, not even paying attention to these women, who are doing something so unimportant
that it doesn't even bear his notice. Woman: When this painting
was shown in the salon, it was criticized because
it made people in the city in Paris who were at the salon
have a sense of fearfulness of what would happen if people
like this in these circumstances were radicalized and mobilized as they
had been in the Revolution of 1848. Was there the potential
for another revolution? What about the poverty
and the countryside? There was something about
these women that although we may see them as terribly
sad and downtrodden, there was something about them
in 1857 that was frightening
to the Parisian populous. Man: You know, perhaps because of that,
Millet has done something interesting. He has rendered these women doing this back-breaking labor right before us, but they're not in rags. They are
seemingly well-fed and strong. And so there is something
of a mixed message here. Woman: That goes back to the softness
with which they're represented. There is a way that they are
all below the horzion line. They are embraced by the landscape. There is a rhyming between the
rounded forms of their backs. There is something lovely and
beautiful about the composition at the very same time that we have
this image of back-breaking labor. So perhaps Millet is giving
us this very difficult image, but it's not as difficult
as it could have been. Man: So he is softening the blow for us. He's making this more
palatable to his audience. (piano music)