North Carolina Museum of Art

Jean-François Millet wanted to finish this canvas for the Paris World's Fair of 1855, but his projects for that year proved to be too ambitious. Millet's peasant subjects and his realistic style were not yet popular and would have seemed out of step with the urban novelties of the Fair. His friend and fellow painter Théodore Rousseau bought Peasant Spreading Manure even without its finishing details. The open landscape, new to Millet's paintings, no doubt appealed to the other artist, but it was primarily to assist Millet with his debts that Rousseau bought it. The son of farmers, Millet had not found success at the prestigious art school of Paris, preferring the village life near the forest of Fontainebleau. Millet was devoted to cataloguing aspects of peasant life. Unlike the Impressionists, who began to paint about a decade after this painting, Millet made several preparatory drawings for figures such as the farmer in his wooden shoes. Though he represented his subjects with dignity, his views present a life of struggle and toil. "It is never the cheerful side of things that appears to me," he wrote of his work. By the 1870s Millet and the like-minded painters known as the Barbizon group were gaining acceptance in exhibitions, with collectors, and in the eyes of the young Impressionists, who admired the naturalness of their landscapes.