Which artist painted "The Gleaners"?

Jean-François Millet painted “The Gleaners.”

Completed in 1857, the oil painting—known in French as Des glaneuses—shows three rural women gathering leftover stalks of wheat after a harvest. Millet placed the women prominently in the foreground while a richly productive field and busy workers recede behind them, creating a powerful contrast between abundance and poverty.

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1857, shortly after the political upheavals of the 1848 French Revolution. Many wealthy and middle-class viewers found its monumental treatment of poor laborers unsettling, fearing that it gave an imposing presence to the rural working class. Millet’s subject was therefore more than a picturesque farm scene: it addressed social class and the realities of rural life.

A frequent mix-up is with Millet’s other famous painting, “The Angelus.” “The Gleaners” is now held at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and is regarded as a major work of nineteenth-century French Realism and the Barbizon tradition.