Millet's The Angelus, Waynesboro, VA, 1909

About this postcard

A reproduction of Jean-François Millet's painting The Angelus: a peasant man and woman stand in a worked field at dusk, heads bowed for the evening prayer, a pitchfork planted upright at the left and a wheelbarrow of sacks behind the woman. Millet painted the scene near Barbizon in the late 1850s, and it became one of the most widely copied images of the nineteenth century, turning up on prints, reproductions, and postcards in huge numbers. The message side carries only a brief greeting to Ernest Fisher, sent to a rural free delivery route. Rural delivery had spread across the Shenandoah Valley by the early 1900s, and a picture postcard was a cheap way to send a few words to a farm address before the telephone reached most households.