The painting is famous for featuring in a sympathetic way what were then the lowest ranks of rural society; it was received poorly by the French upper classes.

One critic commented that "his three gleaners have gigantic pretensions, they pose as the Three Fates of Poverty...their ugliness and their grossness unrelieved.

[5] While The Gleaners garnered little but notoriety during his life, after his death in 1875, public appreciation of his work steadily broadened.

Its imagery of bending peasant women gleaning was paraphrased frequently in works by younger artists such as Pissarro, Renoir, Seurat, and van Gogh.

Daumier's and Degas's laundresses, and even more so Caillebotte's floor-scrapers, are almost unthinkable without Millet's epic hymn to labor.

His brutal depiction of three hunched, female paupers segregated from the laborers and the abundant crop in the distance demonstrates his attention to, if not necessarily sympathy for, the plight of the poorest members of the community around Barbizon and its larger neighbor, Chailly, as the area experienced the growing pains of French modernization.

Only about thirty-five miles from the French capital (whose population doubled between 1831 and 1851), the rich, broad plain bordering the forest of Fontainebleau was among the earliest with a rail link to Paris, readily lending itself to feeding the burgeoning city.

The Gleaners was included in the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons as a piece of art that can be donated to the museum.