Focus on Man with a Hoe and analyze the History.
L'homme à la houe was first exhibited at the salon of the  Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1863. The immediate response from several critics was wrath; Paul Saint-Victor notably wrote, "He lights his lantern and looks for a cretin; he must have searched for a long time before finding his peasant leaning on a hoe...There is no gleam of human intelligence in this animal. Has he just come from working? Or from murdering?" Saint-Victor is believed to have been comparing the subject of the painting to French serial killer Martin Dumollard.Man with a Hoe was deliberately provocative in its aesthetic if not its politics; "in which he made a clean sweep of everything that could possibly please, and displayed his roughness absolutely bare. It was, as he said himself, the sheer 'cry of the earth' in all its savage reality." The inclusion of thistles and thorns in the left foreground is said to be suggestive of "barrenness, toil, pain and the Passion of the Christ." The Man with a Hoe was the last painting of Millet's so-called "radical" era, which began with The Sower (1850).After the initial shock of the new, Man with a Hoe lived a quiet life until the 1880s when it re-emerged as a star of three major French exhibitions including the art show at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris.Ellen Sperry Crocker, wife of William H. Crocker, bought the painting in 1891 and brought it to the United States. The price was said to be 700,000 French francs or US$125,000 (equivalent to about $4,071,296 in 2022). The Crockers' butler, Mr. Head, saved the painting from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire that destroyed the Crockers' Nob Hill home. The Getty Museum purchased it from Crocker's heirs in 1985.
1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire Academie des Beaux-Arts butler William H. Crocker 1906 San Francisco earthquake 1889 World's Fair Passion of the Christ French franc Paul Saint-Victor Martin Dumollard The Sower Nob Hill Ellen Sperry Crocker