Baby's Slumber

A young woman multitasks in Jean Millet’s lyrical vision of rural family life. While mending clothes, she rocks her sleeping child with her outstretched foot. Visible through the open window, her husband works in the garden. Millet's idealized image of maternal devotion and domestic harmony was meant to celebrate the virtues of the French peasant class—patience, diligence, perseverance—and the dignity and continuity of life on the land.

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