No food embodies such a complex symbolic meaning as bread. Since biblical times, it has represented the irreducible minimum required for survival. For millenia, the price and quality of the basic loaf provided a barometer of a nation’s health, while a citizen’s social and cultural level was measured by the kind of bread he or she ate. In France, “to eat one’s white bread first” signified someone who achieved early success, only to fail in later life, while there was no greater praise than to call a person, “Bon, comme le bon pain” (“Good, like good bread”).
Bread’s artistic significance to the French was further confirmed in 2015 when the notebooks of Marcel Proust revealed that the inspiration of À la recherche du temps perdu was not, as in the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, a fragment of madeleine, dissolved in a few drops of his aunt’s lime flower tisane. Rather, according to the literary scholar who unraveled Proust’s spidery annotations, the author, as he writes that passage, “has not still definitively chosen the cake ‘shaped by the mold in the form of Saint Jacques’s shell.’ He hesitates, envisages various types of pastry, a slice of pain grillé, even considers a cookie. It’s not until his mother enters the story that he decides at last on the archetypal Proustian madeleine.” Who knows what different directions this masterpiece might have taken had he not selected the madeleine but gone ahead with his first idea, a humble slice of slightly burned pain grillé: i.e., toast.
One of the few artists to treat bread and grain with the respect they deserved was Jean-François Millet. The most emblematic of his works, Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), painted in 1857, shows three peasant women combing a field for stalks of wheat left behind by the harvest. (Exceptionally in France, the right to glean is guaranteed by law, a concession granted by Henry IV in 1554, but limited to the day following a harvest). After picking over the fields, the gleaners moved to the threshing floor, where grain was winnowed from chaff. As a boy, Henri Matisse rescued any grain that lodged in the grooves between tiles. For every 20 grams he retrieved, his father paid him the smallest coin then in use, a sou.
Poet Frédéric Mistral, the child of Norman farmers, grew up surrounded by images of sowing, reaping and gleaning. As an adult, he moved south to Arles in Provence, where he remembered “troops of gleaners who traveled all over the region. They slept in the fields under little tents to protect themselves against mosquitoes, and a third of their gleaning went to the hospital, according to the custom of Arles.” Work in the fields demanded a robust diet:
The reapers had five meals a day. At 7 o’clock, breakfast: a pickled anchovy, spread on a slice of bread dipped in vinegar and oil, and a very hot red onion; about 10 o’clock the ‘Big Drink,’ consisting of a hard boiled egg in its shell with a chunk of cheese; at one o’clock, dinner, made up of soup and boiled vegetables; about four o’clock ‘tea,’ a big salad with a ‘capon’ of bread rubbed with garlic, and in the evening, supper; pork or lamb, or a so-called ‘harvester’ omelette, with onions.
After failing as a portrait painter, Millet was inspired by Honoré Daumier’s pictures of the urban poor to apply the same searching examination to the peasantry. This was dangerously out of step with the art establishment of the time. Hoping to repair the image of the government and the church, the authorities encouraged “history paintings” that celebrated military triumphs and stories from mythology and the Bible. These received preferential hanging at the annual salons, and their artists were first in line for lucrative commissions to decorate public buildings or serve on influential committees.
Critics and fellow artists derided Millet’s canvases of a sower scattering seed, a woman baking bread and farm workers gathering the potato harvest. In particular, they disliked Les Glaneuses. Millet worked on the painting for 10 years. The three women represent the three stages of this backbreaking work, one scanning the ground, another bending down, the third straightening up. The size of the canvas, approximately a meter square, challenged the worth of history paintings by depicting peasant life in the dimensions normally devoted to figures of the great. Critics also protested the picture’s political subtext, which contrasts the stoop labor of the gleaners in the foreground with the prosperity of the farm-owners, represented by the haystacks and piled stooks of wheat in the distance, and the mounted steward, ensuring the women move on at sunset.
Les Glaneuses sold for far less than Millet hoped, so he welcomed a commission from the American poet and sometime patron of the arts, Thomas Gold Appleton, for his next major work, the image of a peasant couple, heads bowed, praying for the success of the potato crop. When Appleton failed to collect the painting, Millet added a church steeple in the background and retitled it The Angelus, implying that the man and woman have paused for the prayer of that name, traditionally offered at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., and signaled by the tolling of church bells. The painting may even have had an additional secret agenda. In 1933, Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí wrote The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus, an essay suggesting the couple are actually praying over the body of a dead child. Art historians scorned his theory—until the canvas was X-rayed, revealing an over-painted shape at their feet, resembling a coffin.
The Angelus, Jean-François Millet, 1857–1859, Musée d’Orsay
By the time Millet died in 1875, he was acknowledged as a pioneer of social realism. Lithography had made The Gleaners and The Angelus a feature of pious parlors and religious institutions all over the world. In 1867, the Exposition Universelle presented a retrospective exhibition, including both canvases. Gleaning remains a feature of French life. More than a century later, filmmaker Agnès Varda made Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), an account of the modern-day scavengers who carry on the practice of gleaning, both in France’s fields and orchards, and in the streets of its cities, collecting and recycling discarded objects into art.