La Paye des moissonneurs

La Paye des moissonneurs (The Harvesters' Pay) was exhibited at the Salon of 1882, where the French state purchased it on the opening day — an exceptional mark of official recognition. The painting was awarded the gold medal at that Salon and established Lhermitte, at the age of thirty-seven, as the foremost painter of French rural life. The scene is set in the courtyard of the Ru Chailly farm at Mont-Saint-Père in the Aisne, the Picardy village where Lhermitte was born and which furnished the subjects of his work throughout his career. Several of the figures depicted were local inhabitants whom Lhermitte used repeatedly: the seated farmhand Casimir Dehan, identifiable by his scythe, also appears in Lhermitte's closely related paintings Le Cabaret (1881) and La Moisson (1883). Lhermitte trained at the Petite École (later the National School of Decorative Arts) in Paris under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, a teacher whose emphasis on visual memory shaped an entire generation of French artists. Preparatory drawings for the composition are held in the collection of the Louvre. The painting is now in the permanent collection of the Musée d'Orsay.