The Gleaners
Similarly though the women grasp the wheat in their hands on the left is shown a cache of what they have collected. This is vastly different from Millet's as his showed how little there was left. Lhermitte shows quite a bit of excess. When viewing the ground, identifying individual wheat grains is difficult if not impossible. This could be a representation of how difficult the work is, the endless task of gathering enough wheat to keep the families of these women fed. Around the same time the painting by Lhermitte was published and presented at the Salon, Millet's own "The Gleaners" was beginning to receive public appreciation. This led Lhermitte to continue painting scenes of rural France, many of which share the same name, "The Gleaners".