A sombre depiction of an exhausted woodcutter encountering Death, painted by the French Realist Jean-François Millet in 1859.

Jean-François Millet, a central figure of the Barbizon school, produced this work during a period when he focused on the hardships of rural life. The composition draws from the fable by Jean de La Fontaine, in which an elderly woodcutter, exhausted by his labour and the weight of his burden, calls upon Death to end his suffering. When Death appears, the woodcutter is terrified and begs for more time. Millet depicts the woodcutter in a state of physical collapse, his body hunched over a bundle of sticks. The figure of Death, rendered as a skeletal form draped in a shroud, looms over him with a scythe. The artist employs a sombre, earthy palette to convey the grim reality of the peasant experience. The lighting is dramatic, casting deep shadows that obscure the background and focus the viewer on the interaction between the two figures. Unlike many of his contemporaries who painted idyllic scenes of the countryside, Millet chose to represent the struggle and fatigue inherent in manual labour. The painting avoids sentimentality, opting instead for a stark portrayal of mortality. The texture of the paint and the muted tones contribute to the heavy atmosphere of the scene. This work remains a significant example of how Millet used traditional literary themes to comment on the social conditions of his time, specifically the relentless toil of the working class in nineteenth-century France.