Work and Poverty

Context

• 3 peasant women, gleaning field, Millet would have experience as a peasant farmer's son
• Exhibited 1840, 'left wing agenda' questioned, gleaners unidealised and strong 'Man with ***'
• Barbizon school- nostalgia for country, painting nature, religious notion that man was condemned to toil, peasants are monumental and noble

Romantic

• Loose brushwork, foreshortening creating movement and energy
• Themes of repressed liberty and man and nature at women, dependancy on the land

Realism

• Rural life as a subject, peasants in heroic large scale
• Class distinction- labour in foreground, wealthy on horses in back, light also shows this
• Tricolor- revolution, black woman clenches fist- revoultionary anger in the country
• 'Bears the thorn of revolution'

Woman at work

• Young, pale tired, clock reads 2.30am looks out window to church, face lit up like a saint
• Simple clothes, cracks in walls, all object in one room, ill- medicine bottles 
• Isolated and vulnerable, youn and beautiful to appeal to upper class male audience

Context

• Moved from painting academic to cruelty in Victorian society
• Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' in Punch Magazine- more public awareness, Mayhew's 'London Labour and the London Poor' - spoken of health problems of seamstress
• More interest in philanthropt e.g. Employment Commission set up 1843

Comment on Society

• Respectable- chose this over prostitution, aso seen in Millais' 'Vice and Virtue' 1853
• Tenniel's 'Haunted Lady' in Punch Magazine- emancipated seamstress
• Sister died of typhoid as governess, 'The Poor Teacher' (1843), 'too lonely'

People

• Navvies- heroic, classicised, provided clean water, dangerous job
• Brain workers - Carlyle and Rev Maurice (Christian Socialist), mimic Greek sages
• People out of work on bank, peasant, Irish orange seller (emigration of 1840s)
• Ragged children, eldest looks after them, black ribbon= mother dead, father an alchoholic
• Woman hands out leaflets on prohibition, dwarfish man with beer tray
• Chickwead seller - dignity in honest work rather than being a criminal
• Rich in background, look down, mirror by whippet in red coat and stray dog

Influences

• PRB technique of detailed observation at Hampstead Heath- akin the hard work, heroic size
• Plight of workers - Communist Manifesto 1848 and Charles Dickens
• Carlyle talked of Medieval past where people worked for God not profit
• Mayhew's articles in Morning Chronicle, Smile's 'Self Help' - anyone could be leader in society