the gleaners

An 1857 painting by the French Realist painter Jean-François Millet, depicting peasant women gleaning (i.e., picking up stray stalks that escaped the main harvest) a recently harvested wheat field. The French middle and upper classes, and particularly the art critics among them, did not receive the painting well, perceiving it as a crypto-Socialist glorification of workers and peasants (still very much a sore point after the Revolution of 1848).