On January 20, 2025, La Poste issues a stamp from the artistic series illustrated by Des glaneuses by Jean-François Millet, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his death.
Their backs are bent, they look at the ground, they look for the ears of corn that the harvesters would have forgotten. Behind them, large stacks, the hay is piled up, a certain image of abundance can be guessed, guarded by a manager on horseback, but the focus remains on these women, these gleaners, whose bodies are sculpted by the light of the setting sun. Des glaneuses, which Jean-François Millet painted in 1857 before presenting it at the Salon, received a mixed critical reception, he was accused of mythologizing poverty, the rural proletariat, of using pictorial realism for political ends, but the painting is part of an approach he had begun ten years earlier after settling in Barbizon. The beginning of his career, between the Cotentin and Paris, had been uncertain, oscillating between portraiture and the painting of classical nudes inspired by 18th-century art whose canvases he had studied at the Louvre.
Barbizon, where he participated in the establishment of the famous school of the same name, led him into the study of landscape, rural scenes and in particular agricultural occupations. With his Gleaners, Millet continues this evocation of an immutable world, the work of the fields, the nobility of daily tasks, he uses light, its reflections, its power of expression which individualizes and at the same time elevates the characters. In this, he prefigures the movements and artists who will see in him a master, from Van Gogh to the Impressionists and to Dalí or Edward Hopper. Each time, it is the role of light in the face of the formal, almost traditional qualities of the composition which gives a modernity to the whole, which surrounds it with an austere calm. The painting will be acquired by Mrs. Pommery, from the famous Champagne house, before being donated to the State. It is exhibited at the Louvre Museum until 1986 and, since then, at the Musée d'Orsay.
