Jean-François Millet

Paul Casimir-Périer, Paris
Collection J*** (and sold: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, November 26, 1930, lot 9, illustrated)
Pincus S. Brenner, New York (acquired from the above and sold: Parke-Bernet, New York, November 22, 1944, lot 45, illustrated)
Sale: Parke-Bernet, New York, May 7, 1952, lot 73, illustrated
E. and A. Silberman Galleries, New York
Private Collection, Ohio (and sold: Christie's, New York, May 22, 1990, lot 169, illustrated)
Gallery Iida, Tokyo (acquired at the above sale)
Private Collection, Japan

Tokyo, Bunkamura; Kyoto, Municipal Museum of Art; Kofu, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, Jean-François Millet: Four Seasons--Earth's Gentle Colors, 1991, no. 15
Kofu, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, Return to Nature: J. F. Millet, the Barbizon Artists and the Renewal of the Rural Tradition, 1998, no. II-15   
Nagoya, City Art Museum; Morioka, Iwate Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Museum of Art,  Van Gogh, Millet and the Barbizon Artists, 2004, no. 30            

Jean-François Millet painted Les Moissoneurs endormis around 1847-48.  Although he was still living in Paris, Millet was finally moving forward with his long-held dream of painting the realities of rural life.  In the wake of the Revolution of 1848, he would soon move his own young family from the troubled French capital to the tiny village of Barbizon.

During the late 1840s, Millet's scenes of country labor and village life were created from a mixture of his own youthful experience in a remote Normandy village, inspirations gleaned from walks in the urbanized farmlands north of Paris, and examples of the great masters he so deeply admired. His earliest paintings of shepherdesses and harvesters had a markedly Rococo flavor, a prettiness that was necessary to make such pictures saleable to an urban audience; but with Les Moissoneurs endormis, Millet began to move toward a much more realistic presentation of the French countryside.

In Les Moissoneurs endormis, a peasant couple take a brief rest from the heavy labors of the harvest.  Atop a pile of grain sheaves, an exhausted young wife sleeps heavily against her husband's knee, while he keeps a weary but protective watch over her and their child who lies sprawled between her legs.  A jug that held their break-time wine or water is discarded to the side and behind the tired family, workers have resumed building a stack to dry the newly cut grain.  The beautifully realized figures of Les Moissoneurs endormis reflect the many studies of the nude at which Millet was laboring in these years, as well as the example of Michelangelo, whose drawings in the Louvre collections were a powerful influence as Millet developed his own figure style.  The pervasive golden hue that colors the sky and tints the sleeping family suggests the high summer heat and the grain dust that filled the harvest air.

Les Moissoneurs endormis was owned by Paul Casimir-Périer, a prominent conservative politician and President of France during the Third Republic (1894-95).  That one of Millet's images of peasant life, so frequently reviled at the time he created them, should have belonged to a French president is a reflection of how dramatically cultural and political values shifted during the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. Less than twenty years after Millet's death, the French peasant and farmer were widely accepted symbols of the most enduring values of the French nation.