Everyone likes a good hero story, a protagonist struggling against the odds, yearning for home or homeland. There’s the classic story of the Odyssey—featuring the Greek hero Odysseus—but popular culture now has countless versions, whether kids’ superheroes or the latest Tom Cruise movie.

Now what if you wanted to tell a hero story without words? What if your storytelling medium is silence? What if it’s pictorial, using only imagery, color, shape and form within the four-corner limits of a canvas? How would you do this?

Luckily, the painter-storyteller leaves clues in the work itself. We just need to learn where to look. It’s mind-reading the painter based on the evidence in the composition, looking below the surface into the design.

So, let’s look at the masterpiece ’Haying Scene’ (1884) by French naturalist painter Julien Dupré (1851–1910) which you can see in person at the Cincinnati Art Museum’s exhibition Farm to Table.

Here are three images: the first is Dupré’s painting, the second is my quick compositional sketch of the main features, and the third is an abstract sketch of the main lines of force and energy within the work. The three images go from realism to abstraction.

Eye-catching realism sits on a scaffolding of strong abstract design. It’s not accurate to make a big distinction between realism and abstraction in painting. It’s not either/or—instead, it’s both/and.

So, what’s the story?

Setting the Scene. Every good story sets a scene, a context, a place. The painting design begins the scene with what’s called the horizon line. (image 1). Above is the sky, below is the French countryside. Both the sky and the countryside are actors in the story. The sky isn’t a pretty blue summer day. A storm is coming. Rain is a big threat to haying as it can ruin a crop. Below the horizon line, two thirds of the painting, is not just a pretty rural French landscape but a workplace. Haying is arduous work. So here we have the scene: workers struggling mightily to move mountains of hay before the rain comes. It’s a hard race against time and the hard facts of nature and farming.

The Actors. The protagonist is placed right in front of us, a few feet away, as if we are there in the field.

But she’s not alone. In the distance are her co-workers, one atop the mountainous hay pile overloading the wagon. Other figures bend to the haying along with three horses waiting to pull the heavy haul. So, the protagonist is part of a team, a laboring team of French peasants.

The Hero. The team is the collective hero, the individual hero is in front of us showing her great strength and determination with a fork taller than she is. Two diagonal lines (image 3) energize the figure, the fork going this direction \ and the leg going the other /, counterbalancing and forming an abstract X, marking a visual focal point.

Her hat is red, blouse is white, and skirt is blue: the French flag colors. She is planting the French flag, with the hay rake as the pole, turning her into a symbol of national vigor and resilience during a stormy era in French history.

Is this painting from the 19th century relevant to our lives today? Yes, because there are many human stories behind the food we eat and the goods we consume. As we lift our forks, maybe there’s a nudge from ’Haying Scene’ to appreciate the working hands that brought food to our tables and to reconsider who we think are heroes.