The Siesta

Noonday Rest (La Méridienne), often known by its English title The Siesta, was created in 1866 by the French Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet as part of a series of pastels commissioned by the wealthy Parisian collector Émile Gavet. It depicts two peasants — a man and a woman — resting together in the shade of a haystack during the heat of the working day, their bodies slack with an exhaustion Millet renders as tender rather than merely weary.

Millet had spent two decades painting the dignity of rural labor, and by the mid-1860s he turned increasingly to pastel, a medium that let him work with a softer, more atmospheric touch than his earlier oils. The composition would later inspire Vincent van Gogh's own version of the same subject, painted at Saint-Rémy in 1889–90 after a black-and-white reproduction of Millet's original.

Now held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this masterwork is presented here as a premium stretched canvas reproduction, printed on museum-quality matte canvas and hand-wrapped around a sturdy 0.75-inch gallery wrap frame — ready to display and built to last.