Afterlife

The afterlife of The Gleaners is one of the great reversals in art history, and you can measure it in money. When Millet first sold the painting, in 1857, he was short of cash and let it go for 3,000 francs — below even his own asking price of 4,000. The despised picture, the one the critics called ugly and dangerous, went out cheap. That is where the story starts: a working painter, underpaid, parting with a masterpiece because he needed the money.

Now jump forward about thirty years. By the 1880s the canvas had risen into the collection of a Paris banker, Ferdinand Bischoffsheim — already a sign that the despised had become the desirable. And in 1889 it went to auction and sold for 300,000 francs. Read those two numbers together: three thousand francs to three hundred thousand, a hundredfold jump in a single working lifetime. The picture that frightened the bourgeoisie of 1857 had become, by 1889, exactly the kind of trophy the bourgeoisie paid fortunes to own. Within a week of that sale it was announced that the buyer was Jeanne-Alexandrine Louise Pommery — head of the great Pommery champagne house, one of the most successful businesswomen in France. The gleaners now belonged to a champagne fortune.

And then Mme Pommery did the thing that closes the circle. When she died, in 1891, her will gave the painting to the nation: The Gleaners was bequeathed to the Louvre, the great Paris museum, the very heart of official French art. Sit with that for a moment. The picture the State’s own official Salon had recoiled from in 1857 — the one a critic had compared to the guillotines of the Terror — was handed, free, into the permanent keeping of the nation whose taste it had once outraged. The threat had become the heirloom. And there is a quiet symmetry worth naming: this painting of the rural female poor — three women who owned nothing — was carried into the national collection by a woman of great independent wealth, Louise Pommery, who had built and run one of France’s major champagne houses on her own account. The scandal had become a national treasure that one of the most successful businesswomen in France thought important enough to give to her country forever.

(A small note for the careful: the route into the national collection runs through Pommery’s 1889 purchase and her 1891 bequest, not through any single tidy “gift” a year before — the often-repeated shorthand. The verified dates are the ones above.)

For most of the twentieth century the painting hung among the national collections, and then it found its permanent home. In 1986 the Musée d’Orsay opened on the Left Bank of the Seine — a museum dedicated to nineteenth-century art, installed inside the converted shell of the Gare d’Orsay, a grand old Paris railway station that had been saved from demolition and rebuilt as a gallery. The Louvre’s nineteenth-century holdings crossed the river to fill it, and The Gleaners went with them. It is there now, on permanent view, and you can stand in front of those three bent women any day the museum is open — a few feet from Courbet’s village funeral and Millet’s own Angelus, the quiet half of Realism gathered in one set of rooms.

But the truest measure of the painting’s afterlife is not the auction price or the museum wall. It is how completely the image escaped the frame. The Gleaners became one of the most reproduced pictures of the entire nineteenth century — printed and reprinted, copied, hung in countless homes, taught to schoolchildren, parodied, quoted, turned into a shorthand for rural labor and rural poverty everywhere. Three anonymous women, bent over a stripped field, gathering the grain the harvest dropped, became one of the most recognized images on Earth.

It also lit a fire in other painters. The young Vincent van Gogh worshipped Millet, copied his peasant subjects again and again, and built his own early art on Millet’s example of taking field labor seriously; Millet’s name runs all through Van Gogh’s letters. Through Van Gogh and others, the gleaners’ dignity passed down into the painting of the poor for generations.

So put the whole arc in one breath. Millet took the very poorest people in France, doing the very lowest work there is — gathering the scraps a vanishing right still let them gather — and painted them with the grave seriousness art had always saved for gods and kings. The Salon of 1857 saw a threat and recoiled. Within a lifetime the same world paid a hundred times the original price to own the picture, gave it to the nation, and hung it where the schoolchildren file past. The three bent women won. They are still bent, still gathering, still there on the wall in Paris — and now everyone agrees they were always worth looking at.