Evening on the Homestead

The Homestead Act, signed by Lincoln on 20 May 1862, offered 160 acres of public land to anyone who would live on it and work it for five years. The claim credited as the first was filed in Nebraska on 1 January 1863, the day the law took effect. Hundreds of thousands of families followed, breaking sod that had never been turned, building with whatever a treeless country offered, often miles from the nearest neighbor. Most of the labor fell to two people. So did most of the praying.

Jean-François Millet painted The Angelus between 1857 and 1859; it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Two peasants in a potato field stop work at dusk and bow their heads as the evening bell rings from a church steeple on the horizon. Millet said he painted it remembering how his grandmother made the family stop in the fields to pray. The pause is the whole subject; the work waits.

The French field becomes the Nebraska prairie. The man on the left holds his hat in both hands; the woman on the right, in a bonnet and apron, has her hands folded at her chest. Between them the spade stands upright in the dirt over a basket of potatoes; behind her a barrow carries a full sack. Far off on the right stand a windmill, a house with one window lit and, fainter still, a steeple, and the sky is going the same color as that window.

The distance between the couple and their house is the measure of what they work. Everything in the frame is theirs, including the quiet.