Capitalism v. "Man with a Hoe"

Jean-François Millet, Man with a Hoe, 1863. Getty Museum

Crocker, Huntington, and Getty are three of the biggest names of California capitalism. All figure in the story of Jean-François Millet's Man with a Hoe, an emblematic portrait of the downtrodden worker. Millet's painting is now the subject of a one-room dossier exhibition at the Getty Center ("Reckoning with Millet's Man with a Hoe") and an accompanying publication with almost the same name. There John Ott's essay connects a dark-money-funded literary competition to such delirious tangents as Darwinian evolution, eugenics, race, serial killers, and inequality. 

Neither Millet nor Man with a Hoe are the household names they once were. I'll let van Gogh do the introduction: "To me Millet is the essential modern painter," Vincent wrote brother Theo. In their time Millet's paintings were selling for record prices, while van Goghs did not sell at all. 

Jean-François Millet, versions of Shepherdess and Her Flock in oil (Musée d'Orsay, 1864) and pastel (Getty Museum, about 1864-65)

To art historians 1863 is the year of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe at the Salon de Refuses. At the proper Salon, Man with a Hoe sparked a comparable level of pearl clutching and outrage. Millet's painting was damned for its "ugly" depiction of field labor and presumed socialist politics. The criticism led Millet to downplay a leftish agenda and pull back from proletarian provocation. At the 1864 Salon Millet showed Shepherdess with her Flock. The prettier female laborer was apparently seen as less of a threat to the aesthetic and economic status quo. It's now on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, next to one of several replications in pastel.

San Francisco's Ethel Crocker bought Man with a Hoe for a then-impressive 340,000 francs (about $60,000 US) in 1890. Ethel was daughter-in-law to Charles Crocker, one of the "Big Four" railroad and real estate tycoons. Man with a Hoe instantly became the best-known painting on the West Coast. (Nearly a century later, the Crocker family sold Man with a Hoe to late oilman J. Paul Getty's cash-flush museum in Los Angeles.)

In 1899 poet and schoolteacher Edwin Markham published a sympathetic though banal poem on Man with a Hoe. Addressed to "masters, lords and rulers in all lands," the poem prophesies a time "when whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world."

How will it be the with kingdoms and with kings—

With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,

After the silence of the centuries?

The poem went viral in newspaper reprints, launching Markham on a lecture tour. He got so rich that he was tagged as the Man with the Dough. There are schools named after Markham from coast to coast, one in Watts.

Several months after the poem's appearance, an anonymous letter appeared in the New York Sun. It offered $700 in prizes for those who could offer the best free market rebuttals to Markham (in verse, of course). The identity of the person making the offer was revealed after his death in August 1900: He was Collis P. Huntington.

Central Pacific railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington was another of the Big Four. He was married to trophy wife Arabella Worsham and uncle to Henry Huntington. Thirteen years after Collis' death, Arabella and Henry married their fortunes and their selves. The couple established the cultural and garden institution in San Marino that bears the Huntington name.

In a 1900 valedictory address to employees at his Nob Hill mansion, Collis framed the Man with the Hoe as a relic of the bad old days, before American free enterprise: "The good workman can generally find work, and can safely trust to that law of the 'survival of the fittest,' under which men who lead industrious and moral lives… always thrive; while men who are lazy, who work intermittently, who spend all they earn and deny themselves nothing that they can procure, as surely go to the wall." John Ott's essay in the publication demonstrates how little the talking points on economic difference change. Raggedy Hoe-Man just needs to cut out the lattes and work harder. 

P.S. Millet gets a cameo in the current Agnes Varda installation at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. In The Gleaners and I (2000) Varda likens her practice to that of the stooped laborers in Millet's The Gleaners. Varda filmed people who eke out a living from the detritus of consumerist France. On view is an anonymous gouache on wood painting featured in the film.

S. Duporge(?), pastiche of Millet paintings, dated 1955. On view at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures