Jean François Millet is best known for his images of peasants working the land. Although his depictions of rural labour and poverty are bleak, they have an elegiac quality, as by the mid-nineteenth century traditional peasant life was in retreat in an increasingly urban and industrial France. This etching shows three peasant women picking up the ears of corn missed by the harvesters, their age-old entitlement. Millet's painting of the same subject is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.