The painting shows a laborer or farmer in a field, resting for a moment on his hoe. If you glance at the field behind him, you won't envy the backbreaking work he has put into his day. I am going to say that he is not working with your ordinary Home Depot garden hoe, but a solid iron agricultural tool that very definitely will get heavier as the day progresses.
But why did Markham pick such an ordinary subject out of the sublime and majestic that would have delighted the well-to-do visitors of art galleries? My guess is that it was shocking in the very same way Gustave Courbet's The Stone Breakers or Burial at Ormans shocked the fashionable Parisian public. It was a world away from Claude Monet's Le Bassin d'Argenteuil with its sailboats on a lovely, placid summer day.
The painter of Man with a hoe wanted, as Courbet wanted, to remind the self-satisfied public of the millions whose lives made the world turn, and perhaps motivate them into reforming action.
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