This monumental and majestic painting of gleaners by Léon Lhermitte is one of the most tender and arresting renditions of a subject that nourished his long and successful career as a leading French Realist artist. Several figures stand, sit, and sleep at rest between neatly gathered stacks of wheat after a lunch break while working in the fields. Nestled next to the sleeping woman, who rests her head on tied sheaths, is an extraordinary still life–a wicker basket with a bottle of wine, paper wrapped delectable, and overturned tin crockery–that lends a sense of lived experience to the otherwise highly composed arrangement of modest figures in the rural agrarian landscape. The standing mother at right, carrying not only a child but also a bundle of wheat, looks longingly to her compatriots; the young man kneels to wrangle the next bunch while another young woman sits with her elbows propped on her knees, head in hand, staring pensively into the distance. The scene is pushed right up to the front of the picture plane, as if to attest to the artist’s actual presence there, as a witness to an almost sacred scene of agricultural labor and the sustenance such efforts yield.

While stacks of wheat today recall the series of canvases painted and exhibited by Claude Monet in 1891, Lhermitte would have been looking to contemporaries such as Millet, Corot, and Daubigny whose depictions of the French rural landscape elevated these humble subjects to the status of high art.