Starting with Gustave Courbet’s 1849 painting The Stonebreakers, illustrates two laborers, one too young and one too old, creating gravel for roads; a fatiguing and backbreaking job at the time with little payoff. Courbet aimed to represent the workers he had seen in their purest form and tried to express their hardship and exhaustion through this painting. Most of the emphasis is given to the patched and tattered clothing of the two figures, with the use of harsh brushstrokes and dark contrast making the two figures stand out from the earth. In his painting, Courbet utilized realism to portray the everyday plight of the poor who are forced to endure and the depriving labor that goes unnoticed.

Jean-François Millet has spent years of his life living in poverty and devoted his work to painting scenes of peasant life. In his most notable work, The Gleaners, he depicts three peasant women gleaning, the lowest form of work for women in French society, where they’re required to gather grains at the end of a harvest day missed by harvesters. The women continuously bend their backs to collect the gains one by one, with the light spotlighting the curving of their backs. This is directly contrasted — painted with dark shadows of the women’s clothing standing in the foreground — by the several harvesters with their wheat-carrying horses celebrating their bountiful harvest in the background. Millet depicts a realistic view of the peasant life of gleaners with a sympathetic view toward rural poverty and the lower class.

The last work showcased is Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, which depicts the 32-year-old migrant farmworker, Florence Thompson, shielding her  three children huddling close together who are living in one of California’s labor camps. Lange’s work documents the plight of the rural poor during the Great Depression and gives a voice to the poor families that were hit hardest by the collapse of the U.S. economy. Lange carefully used her lens and composed the image to evoke the raw emotional impact of the crisis and to showcase the strength that the mother and her children had to endure the unfairness of the Depression.