Praying for the Crop

My work life and my home life couldn’t be more different.  I work in an office at a desk sitting behind a computer for five days a week from 7:30 to 4:30.  When I am home, I am seldom indoors, always outside unless it is dark or storming.  During my lunch breaks at work while I’m enjoying some leftovers, I search through the Internet for stories of interest that I might consume along with last night’s delicious meal.  Those stories are largely about gardening, homesteading, agrarian blogs and such. 

Although I’m by no means an art critic, nor do I have good taste in fine art, I do know what I like when I see it.  On this particular day I think I Googled “Agrarian Art” or “Old Agriculture Paintings” and came across some artwork by an author named Jean-Francois Millet that I liked.  I looked at a lot of his work and I like this one the best:

Image Credit

It is a very simple painting that depicts a couple in the midst of solemn prayer.  If you look closely, you can see that the gentleman has a digging fork and the lady has a basket.  There are potatoes in the basket as well as strewn around on the ground.  There is a wheel barrow loaded with what appears to be sacks of potatoes that they have already dug.

It is either early in the morning or late in the afternoon by the lighting and this tells you that this peasant couple is hardworking.  I think it is nice that they work side by side.  I would imagine that they talk to one another and share their thoughts all day.  Either they are laboring early or they have put in a long day in harvesting the potato crop.  If you look off in the distance, you can see a tall church steeple.  The steeple prominently shown in the background coupled with the couple’s reverence lets you know that faith was of foremost importance to this couple and this rural community.

I wanted to learn more about the background of the painter and the painting so I visited This Site and This Site.  Jean-Francois Millet was from France and was born in 1814.  If you look at his work, you will see that he painted many depictions of peasant agricultural life.  Many of his paintings feature simple farming folk bent over in work and capture the strong work ethic of a people tied to the land and its produce for their very survival.

The painting I posted above was originally named “Prayer for the Potato Crop.”  The art collector who commissioned the painting didn’t pick it up and Millet renamed the piece, “The Angelus.”  The Angelus refers to the ringing of the church bell at 6:00 am, noon, and 6:00 pm, calling Christian people to prayer.  The bell ringing is interesting to me, because my surname, Sonnier, is French and was the occupational name for a bell ringer (Late Latin sonarius, an agent derivative of sonare ‘to ring’) according to what I learned here.  It may have been an ancestor of mine that was up in the bell tower, overlooking the fields and ringing the bell, calling the couple to prayer – although I would have rather been in the fields!

I think it is important that the peasant couple humbled themselves and recognized that their success and survival was dependent upon the Almighty.  They toiled in a hardscrabble existence and performed manual labor that had been in effect since the Curse of the Ground in Genesis 3:17-18.  They were fervently praying for a bountiful harvest.  You can bet that they were doing the same when they planted the potatoes and worked the fields up until the harvest.  You can’t help but hope that their prayers were answered.

Millet’s painting is a good reminder that we would do well to answer ‘the bell’ and its call to prayer in our daily lives.