Return of the Peasants (Le retour des paysans) 

Alphonse Legros made this drawing with graphite. It shows a group of peasants with a cow returning from the fields. Peasant imagery took on a renewed political significance in France after the 1848 revolution, when artists sought to represent the dignity of rural labor. Legros, who later became a professor at the Slade School of Art in London, was one of a number of French artists who turned to rural subjects. It is an interesting move, given that in the mid-19th century, France was rapidly industrialising, and traditional rural ways of life were under threat. Does this image romanticise the hardships of rural labour, or does it critique the economic system that exploits these workers? To understand this artwork, it would be helpful to research not only the art of Legros’s contemporaries, such as Millet and Courbet, but also political documents and social surveys of the period.