Lumberjack preparing firewood 

Jean-François Millet created this drawing of a lumberjack preparing firewood at an unknown date, using pastel and black crayon. Millet was working in mid-19th century France, a time of enormous social upheaval, as rural people migrated to cities in search of work, driven by a combination of poverty and opportunity. Here, the artist depicts working-class people performing a routine task, though there’s nothing routine about its difficulty. Note how the drawing’s composition stresses the endless work. The exhausted landscape and the sky blend into each other. The male lumberjack almost merges with the fence he is building, and the woman in the background collects firewood. This evokes the unending demands of agricultural life. Millet trained in the French academic system, which promoted history painting, but he became known for sympathetic images of rural laborers. This allowed him to make a statement about the dignity of labor during a time of political and economic revolution. To fully understand art like this, we need to look at economic data, political history, and the writings of contemporary critics. Art always exists in a specific time and place.