Artwork of the Week: September 16, 2024
Though beautifully painted and pastorally picturesque, this nineteenth-century oil painting by Jean-François Millet seems benign at first glance. A lone, middle-aged farmer, wearing a faded black cap but no socks, supports a straw basket full of the day’s potato harvest on his right knee. As soon as he sets the basket down, he need only reach for the blue handkerchief tucked into the back of his well-worn trousers to wipe the sweat from his brow. Tired from long hours of physical labor, his hunched posture, downward gaze, and long shadow tell us his day is coming to a close.
Like his well-known painting The Gleaners (1857), this earlier dignified portrayal of a humble potato farmer demonstrates Millet’s awareness of French agricultural politics and delivers an incisive social critique. Born in 1814, the artist grew up in a family of farmers in the French countryside. On April 11, 1815, a year after his birth, the massive volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia polluted the atmosphere with ash and smoke for the better part of 1816. Millet, though an infant at the time, lived through this “Year Without a Summer” and his family would have been directly impacted.
Throughout history, France was plagued by famine due to land mismanagement, cold temperatures, and crop failures. Compared to the rest of Europe, the French were initially resisted modern agricultural practices such as crop rotation, equipment technology, and tuber vegetables. In fact, only a few decades prior the potato itself was thought to cause leprosy and was only deemed “edible” after the pharmacist, Antoine-Agustin Parmentier, convinced his fellow countryman of its merits. Now affectionately known as the French “Johnny Appleseed,” Parmentier published books and pamphlets about the potato’s nutritional value, turned the adornment of delicate potato flowers into a royal fashion trend among the aristocracy, hosted elaborate dinner parties featuring the potato on the menu, and even stationed guards around his own 40-acre plot to encourage the perception of the potato’s value.
Slowly but surely, the French finally dug in. This “apple of the earth” significantly mitigated the nutritional and economical challenges of the time. Within 25 years of Mt. Tambora’s eruption, France had fully embraced the potato as a principal crop within their four-field rotation of barley, wheat, turnips and clover. By 1850, 10 million potatoes grew each year on little strips of land all over the countryside.*
Millet’s farmer works tirelessly in the foreground, harvesting what Le Marquis de Cussy called, “The vegetable of the shack and the château.” Behind him, rotating fields of barley, wheat and clover recede into the horizon. Not only does he carry the weight of his yield, but the weight of history. The artist honors the contribution of agricultural laborers in paintings such as this, reminding viewers of their dependence upon the landscape—and the people who cultivate it.
*Diana S., “68. Antoine Parmentier & the History of the Potato,” The Land of Desire: French History and Culture, April 29, 2021, accessed July 17, 2024.
