In this artwork, how is the Influence discussed?
Along with Woman Pasturing Her Cow and The Gleaners, Man With a Hoe is a Millet painting that casts "a critical light on the conditions of rural labor under the Second Empire and explains [Millet's] sometimes marginal status in the regime's fine arts institutions."The painting has long been seen to have a political and/or philosophical subtext. American critic Ednah Dow Cheney in 1867, in her consideration of the painting's respect for physical labor and the working class generally, wrote, "It stirs the soul with every great problem of life and thought. We would have soon as trusted Garrison or Wendell Phillips to lecture in Charleston before the war as have placed...The Laborer at the mercy of slave holders." In 1908 Gutzon Borglum and Walter Winans wrote that it was not a man with a hoe so much as a "MAN, HANDICAPPED, battling with nature for food, which nature will only yield to him through eternal conflict."According to the critic Robert Hughes, Millet's Man With a Hoe, The Gleaners, The Sower, and The Angelus were collectively "the most popular works of art in the new age of mass production, disseminated by millions of engravings, postcards, knickknacks and parodies. The Sower became the Mona Lisa of socialism, but it served capitalism equally well as the corporate emblem of its owners, the Provident National Bank in Philadelphia."The painting inspired Edwin Markham's 1898 poem "The Man With the Hoe."
Gutzon Borglum the war Provident National Bank Edwin Markham Garrison socialism The Gleaners Wendell Phillips Ednah Dow Cheney Charleston capitalism The Man With the Hoe Second Empire Walter Winans Mona Lisa The Angelus The Sower Robert Hughes Woman Pasturing Her Cow