Tag: Jean Francois Millet

  • Sweating the Small Stuff

    The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet.

    The Gleaners are picking up the last little remains of the harvest. Millet sets the women against a broad horizon and thereby lends a majesty to their work. This was on purpose as Millet saw the work as a social commentary against the rich vs. the poor in society.

  • You Are What You Are

    Le chat (The Cat at the Window), 1857-58 by Jean Francois Millet.

    Millet’s illustration of “The Cat Who Became a Woman,” a fable by the seventeenth-century French writer Jean de La Fontaine. According to the story, a man becomes infatuated with his cat and convinces Destiny to change her into a woman. He marries her, but on their first night together she springs from the marriage bed to chase a mouse across the bedroom floor. The fable’s moral is “The truth will out”: no matter how much one’s outward appearance changes, one’s essential character remains.