Woman Feeding Chickens

Millet's Woman Feeding Chickens from 1846-48 is an early work painted before he settled in Barbizon and developed the monumental peasant imagery for which he is best known. By this period he was moving away from the more refined portrait and mythological subjects of his initial career toward the everyday rural life that would make him one of the most important French painters of the century. The scene's domestic intimacy — a woman performing a routine agricultural task — anticipates the moral dignity Millet would later find in peasant labor, but treated here with a lighter touch than his mature work. The painting shows his close observation of natural light on rural figures and his emerging interest in subjects that contemporary taste considered beneath the dignity of high art, a revaluation that would eventually make him enormously influential on van Gogh and the Impressionists.

Millet's early technique shows the influence of the Old Masters he studied in the Louvre, with rich, warm tones and solid modeling. The figure is rendered with the monumental simplicity that would characterize his mature work, while the domestic setting is painted with warm, naturalistic colors and descriptive brushwork.