Jean-François Millet

Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente Veuve Millet (the artist's widow), April 24-25, 1894, no. 10

Peasant Holding a Winnowing Basket was drawn by Jean-François Millet around 1868-1870, as he began a group of paintings presenting uncommonly direct images of peasant farmers and their families.  The commanding presence of the winnower, willingly posing with his immense, shallow basket, offers a stronger, more aggressive view of a French farmer than had Millet's ground-breaking scene of a winnower actually sifting grain some twenty years earlier (London, National Gallery).  Left unfinished in the wake of the increasing ill-health that led to Millet's untimely death in 1875, Peasant Holding a Winnowing Basket---along with a similarly sized peasant holding a flail, (Cabinet des dessins, Musée du Louvre) and a slightly larger, partially painted, scene of a peasant man and wife standing side-by-side, laced together by the arms of their young child (Cardiff, National Museum of Wales)---provides an intriguing glimpse into Millet's turn toward a more confrontational imagery.  Drawn with a simplicity that borders on brutality, but which never sinks to caricature, these late Millet peasant figures testify to the confidence with which Millet reinvented his art, just as his long-denied popular acceptance was determinedly sentimentalizing the provocation out of his earlier peasant images.