ABSTRACT
The rise of peasant painting in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with and reflected social transformation. Economic, political, and technological factors led to more land coming under cultivation, productivity increasing, and peasants migrating by the millions from their native villages. During this period, land ownership in continental Europe changed in many places. For centuries, the church and nobility owned most farmland, but following legislation throughout Europe at various times during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was owned increasingly by families like the Constables, Courbets, and Millets, who became wealthy by acquiring enough land to produce a surplus beyond their personal needs. Most peasants worked as paid laborers and/or rented small plots of land barely sufficient to provide for their survival in good times. The demise of feudalism meant the end of benign paternalism, under which landowners assumed responsibility for the welfare of the peasants living on their property. Literally overnight in many cases, millions were left to fend for themselves without necessary resources—no food, no home, no land, no money, no work. In Sweden, for instance, the number of landowning peasants increased ten percent between 1750 and 1850, but the number of landless peasants increased 400 percent. In addition to the social unrest discussed in Chapter 9, peasant riots occurred (England 1830, Poland 1846, Russia 1856), throughout Europe in 1848 (after years of drought and bad harvests), and again in the wake of depressions in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Abolition of serfdom—in Austria in 1848 and Russia in 1861—meant that suddenly tens of millions of peasants lost their guarantee of food, shelter, and survival.
