Jean Francois Millet Paintings

Jean Francois Millet (October 4, 1814 - January 20, 1875) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. He is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers. Jean Francois Millet can be categorized as part of the movement termed "naturalism", but also as part of the movement of "realism". One of the most well known of Jean Francois Millet paintings, The Gleaners (1857), was preceded by an earlier version, a vertical composition painted in 1854, and then by an etching of 1855-56 which directly presaged the horizontal format of the painting now in the Muse d'Orsay. It depicts women stooping in the fields to glean the leftovers from the harvest, and is a monumental composition devoted to the rigors of the working class.