The Sower

A lone peasant strides a dusk field flinging seed — life-size, dark, almost menacing, two years after the poor toppled a throne.

1. 1
   The striding giant

   The whole foreground — the dark figure walking toward you down the slope

   A single peasant fills almost the entire canvas, pitched diagonally downhill, his leading leg driving forward and down the slope while the trailing leg stretches back up the rise, weight tipping toward you. He is painted so dark and so large that he reads less as a man than as a silhouette cut out of the dusk — monumental, looming, and a little menacing. There is no one else near him at his scale; the whole picture is built to make this one field hand enormous.
2. 2
   The sowing arm, caught mid-throw

   His right arm, flung across his body to the left; the seed in the air

   His right arm is swept all the way across his chest, the hand open, just past the instant of the throw — you are seeing the follow-through, the seed scattering off into the furrows. It is the single most active gesture in the picture, and Millet froze it at the most violent point of the arc, which is why the figure feels like it is moving even though it is paint.
3. 3
   The seed-bag at his hip

   His left hand, holding a sack of grain against his left side

   His left hand grips a coarse sack or apron of seed slung at his hip — the supply his right hand keeps dipping into and flinging. It anchors the lower-left of the figure and explains the whole motion: reach in, stride, throw, repeat, all the way down the field.
4. 4
   The face that isn’t there

   Under the soft hat, upper-center of the figure

   A soft, floppy hat is pulled down low, and the face beneath it is sunk in shadow — barely a feature legible, no eyes to meet. He is almost faceless, and that is the point: not a portrait of a particular man but Labor itself, anonymous and a little frightening, walking straight at you.
5. 5
   The legs, bound in straw and mud

   His lower legs and feet

   Blue trousers, a rust-brown jacket — and the lower legs and feet wrapped in straw or rag and caked in the same dark earth he treads. These are not boots for a portrait. They are the real protection a man ties on to walk a cold, broken field at the end of the day.
6. 6
   The tiny world behind him

   Far upper right (ploughman and oxen, warm sky) and upper left (birds)

   Up the slope, very small, a man drives a team of oxen finishing the ploughing, with the last warm orange light of dusk and a sunlit bank behind him. At the upper left, a scatter of birds lifts off — already after the seed. These miniature figures do two jobs: they tell you it is the close of the working day, and by being so small they make the foreground sower colossal.