Man with a Hoe

1860–62

Oil on canvas, 81.9 × 100.3 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

An exhausted laborer leans on his hoe in a stony field full of thistles.

At the Salon of 1863 it caused a storm; Parisian viewers found the man brutish and frightening.
It was read as socialist protest; Millet denied being a socialist or a political agitator.
Millet wrote that he tried to say "what I saw and felt" at work in the fields.
No ennobling here: the cost of labor is written on the body.