Woman with a Rake by Jean-François Millet was created in 1856 – 1857. The painting is in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The size of the work is 39,7 x 34,3 cm and is made as an oil on canvas.
Millet first treated this subject in a woodcut, one of ten in the series Labors of the Fields that were published in a popular periodical in 1853. The art dealer Martinet, in whose gallery such avant-garde artists as Courbet and Manet exhibited, included this painting in a show in 1860.
About the Artist: French artist Jean-François Millet was born in Gruchy, Gréville-Hague. He was a French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his paintings of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the Realism art movement. In 1833 his father sent him to Cherbourg to study with a portrait painter named Bon Du Mouchel. By 1835 he was studying with Théophile Langlois de Chèvreville, a pupil of Baron Gros, in Cherbourg.
It was in Paris in the middle 1840s that Millet befriended Constant Troyon, Narcisse Diaz, Charles Jacque, and Théodore Rousseau, artists who, like Millet, became associated with the Barbizon school. In 1849, Millet painted Harvesters, a commission for the state. From 1850 to 1853, Millet worked on Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz), a painting he considered his most important, and on which he worked the longest. Despite mixed reviews of the paintings he exhibited at the Salon, Millet’s reputation and success grew through the 1860s. In 1867, the Exposition Universelle hosted a major showing of his work, with the Gleaners, Angelus, and Potato Planters among the paintings exhibited. Read more
You can order this work as an art print on canvas from canvastar.com
