Jean-Francois Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet began "Going to Work" in 1851, several years after he had stopped painting portraits and academic nudes to concentrate on naturalistic images of rural life.
The oil on canvas painting shows a male and a female peasant crossing the fields in front of an early morning sky. The man has a fork over his shoulder and the woman carries a basket on her head.
Although human beings are central to his art, his portrayals tend to be highly generalized. He was less interested in depicting individual peasants than in representing humankind and its struggle with the soil.
Going to Work by Jean-François Millet 1851
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