Jean-François Millet

Artist's studio; sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 10-11, 1875, lot 107 (mis-identified as a Chevrière auvergnate or Goat Girl)
Hector Brame, Paris
M. Gerard (and sold, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, February 25, 1896, lot 83)
James Connell & Sons, Ltd., Glasgow
Isabel K. Mitchell (acquired from the above)
Thence by descent (and sold: Christie's, New York, October 24, 1990, lot 56, illustrated)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Tokyo, Bunkamura Museum of Art; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Kofu, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, Jean-François Millet - Earth's Gentle Colors, 1991, no. 62

The present work depicts one of the distinctively costumed animal herders who caught Millet's eye during his summer visits to the mountainous region of Auvergne in south-central France during 1866-68. With their conical straw hats, heavy shawls, and traditional rough-hewn distaffs, the Auvergne shepherdesses and goat-girls reminded Millet of peasants from the art of Breughel.  He made numerous quick drawings of Auvergne sheep-tenders, several of which he later worked into pastels and paintings when back in Barbizon.  However, the present work is the only known figural watercolor that Millet created during his visits to Vichy.  In the richness of its color and breadth of its composition, A Shepherdess and her Flock provides a brilliant summary of the Vichy campaign of landscape drawing that so profoundly altered Millet's art for the remaining decade of his life.

Accompanying his ailing wife to the spas at Vichy for several weeks in three consecutive summers, Millet found himself confronting a landscape distinctly different from the plains and forests of his familiar Barbizon. To capture the unfamiliar landscape, he developed a highly personal vocabulary of pencil and pen marks and explored an unusually intense color palette.  The high horizon, densely  textured foreground, and solitary figure standing against a dramatic sky in the present work reflect the complexity of Millet's Vichy experience. The best of his Vichy watercolors combine an old master monumentality with an incipient Impressionism that is uniquely his own.

Millet established the basic composition for A Shepherdess and her Flock in a black crayon and watercolor sketch (Sale: Sotheby's, London, November 23-24, 1983, lot 582) that is much narrower in compass. Later in Barbizon, he would reconfigure the essential elements of the watercolor for a larger oil painting, Pasture in the Auvergne (Chicago, Art Institute).