Jean-François Millet

Millet's studio; sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 10-11, 1875, no. 54
Arthur Stevens, Paris and Brussels (acquired at the above sale)

Madame Briavoinne, Brussels (by 1887)
Boussod Valadon & Cie., Paris (circa 1900)

Harold I. Pratt, New York (by 1925)
Thence by descent
Sale: Doyle, New York, May 10, 1990, lot 28, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, École des Beaux-Arts,  J.-F. Millet, 1887, no. 24, (as La Gardeuse de moutons)
Tokyo, Bunkamura Museum of Art; Kyoto, Municipal Museum of Art; and Kofu, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, Jean-François Millet, 1991, no. 85
Kofu, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, J.F. Millet, the Barbizon Artists and the Renewal of the Rural Tradition, 1998, no. VI-3
Nagoya, City Art Museum; Morioka, Iwate Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Museum of Art, Van Gogh, Millet and the Barbizon Artists, 2004, no. 54

Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, Paris, 1921, vol. III, p. 97, fig. 294
Paul Gsell, Millet, Paris, 1928, pl. 31. 

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting on cradled panel has been quite recently restored and could be hung as is. The panel is flat and the paint layer is stable. The surface may be slightly dirty, but Millet's paint layer is quite subtle and some care will be needed if it is to be cleaned. Under ultraviolet light, what appears to be slight strengthening is visible in the stick of the shepherdess and possibly in the base of the bottom of her skirt. There are some slightly darker fluorescing colors visible which may correspond to retouches in the sky, between the shepherdess and the sheep on the right, above the shepherdess's head and in a couple of spots in the upper left, however it could also all be original paint. My overall impression is that the abovementioned retouches may well be original and the picture should most likely be hung in its current condition, with perhaps only a slight application of varnish.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Jean-François Millet painted Shepherdess Returning with her Flock during 1874, toward the end of his life, as he readdressed many of the favorite subjects that long defined his art. To a familiar theme, a solitary shepherdess leading a small troop of sheep to their evening's shelter, Millet brought a new emphasis on the monumentality of his figure and a complexity of color that edges beyond Barbizon realism toward a larger symbolism.

Since his arrival in Barbizon in 1849, Millet had been fascinated with the young women who tended small flocks of sheep as they grazed on wastelands along the margins of the immense wheat fields that defined their rural community.  During his youth in northern Normandy, Millet had known sheep and cows to pasture unattended, safe in small fields enclosed by thick hedgerows.  On the wide-open farmlands of Chailly, however, sheep and cows had to be watched constantly lest they wander into planted fields or strip young trees and shrubs beyond regrowth.  Unlike the older men who commanded immense troops of sheep that traveled miles over the fields during the fallow season, the Barbizon shepherdesses were local teenagers who spent long hours, every day, close to their village homes but cut off from social contact, watching over placid flocks.  In dozens of drawings and paintings, Millet presented these young shepherdesses, introducing his audience to the facts of such circumscribed lives: the hours of boredom and isolation, whiled away with knitting or daydreams; the occasional moments of pleasant distraction when a friend crossed the path; the bone-chilling winds, the stifling sun.  Millet's sympathetic witness to the real truths of a village girl's life were part of his overall campaign to present the rural world honestly; but his particular interest in the local shepherdesses also reveals Millet's determined effort to retrieve the image of the shepherdess from the trivialization and sexual wantonness assigned her by so many eighteenth-century French artists and playwrights.

Where many of Millet's earlier shepherdess compositions seem to glory in the small details or particular moments of a sheep herder's life, Millet orchestrated the familiar components of Shepherdess Returning with her Flock with a deliberate simplicity that seems to reach beyond particular time or place.  This shepherdess has the strict upright posture and unseeing forward gaze of a queen leading a procession, the dignity of a saint marching toward her fate.  The austere generalization of the shepherdess's traditional costume, the pervasive golden tint of the fading sun, contribute to a mystical aura.  Since the late 1860s, Millet had been moving toward a more monumental presence for his familiar field workers and village housewives; but with Shepherdess Returning with her Flock, he bestowed an especial grandeur upon a familiar village girl.

Shepherdess Returning with her Flock was certainly an important effort for Millet during 1874; he simultaneously developed a vertical variant of the composition (Private Collection, Japan) and left a second, squarer, version in the state of a free drawing on canvas (location unknown). Millet's absorption in the project probably reflects the extraordinary commission which he received during the spring of 1874, an invitation from the French state to paint scenes of the life of Saint Geneviève for the walls of the Panthéon.  The patron saint of Paris, St. Geneviève was a fifth century heroine who calmed and rallied the citizens of Paris against the attacking Huns; and lacking other details of her life, traditional imagery often cast St. Geneviève as a shepherdess.  For an artist who had been so consistently snubbed by the official art establishment, such a commission was an unexpected recognition.  Millet began mulling his compositions almost immediately, and although he would die early in 1875 before he could undertake serious work on the Panthéon scenes, Shepherdess Returning with her Flock certainly can be seen as an indication of the designs he had in mind for that final suite of paintings.