Jean-François Millet

Gleaning was, apparently, a legal right for the poorest people in a village — once the harvest was carted off you could go over the field and keep whatever was left. Well-off critics at the time took badly to seeing that painted this big, and read three women picking up scraps as a political argument rather than a scene.

They've stopped for the evening prayer — the bell would be ringing from that little church on the horizon. Dalí was supposedly obsessed with this picture, insisting the couple were actually mourning a dead child, and an X-ray later turned up a painted-over shape near the basket. No one seems to agree what it was.

He painted this same striding figure more than once; the version that went to the Paris Salon and got people arguing about whether farm labourers belonged in serious painting is a different one, elsewhere. Van Gogh, apparently, copied the sower over and over for years — he treated it as something to learn from rather than something to hang.