Jean-François Millet

Monsieur Atger (acquired from the artist about 1856 and sold: his sale; Paris, Hôtel Drouot, March 12, 1874, lot  72)
Sold: Paris, Hôtel Drouot, March 25, 1907, lot 110, illustrated
Goerg Collection (and sold: Paris, Hôtel Drouot, May 30, 1910, lot 129) 
Private Collection, Argentina
Thence by descent to the present owner

Alexandra Murphy, Jean-François Millet, exh. cat., Boston, 1984, mentioned under no. 74, p. 110

Paper laid down along edges on heavier paper. Spots of foxing in sky. Two water stains in sky.
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The sandstone and granite farm house that overlooks the Channel coast in Jean-François Millet's End of the Hamlet of Gruchy still stands today at the edge of the tiny community where Millet was born, although the twisted, windswept elm tree that loomed so large in the artist's memories was destroyed a decade after this drawing of 1856.  For Millet, End of the Hamlet of Gruchy combined a realistic view of his beloved homeland with a deeply felt ambivalence about his own choices in leaving that village behind. 

Millet walked from Gruchy, far up on the Contentin Peninsula, to Paris in 1837 to study art and returned to the region only sporadically before settling permanently in Barbizon in 1849.  In 1854, however, a modest windfall allowed the artist to take his young family to Gruchy for the entire summer, and there he compiled a portfolio of drawings and sketches which served as inspiration for years thereafter.  End of the Hamlet of Gruchy, based upon on-site sketches which still belong to Millet's descendants, records a quiet moment in the remote community when a mother or grandmother interrupts her spinning to lift the tiny child in her care up to view the sea and the fishing boats far in the distance.  As Millet later explained to an interested author, he was trying to convey the effect on a child's imagination of the immensity of the sea, the grandeur of the racing clouds, and the isolation of a village so tiny that the cry of a goose was an event worth noting.  

Millet drew End of the Hamlet of Gruchy in 1856 and soon thereafter based two paintings on the composition (Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).  When Millet's beloved sister Emélie died in Gruchy in 1866 and he learned that the cherished elm tree had been uprooted by a storm, he returned to the theme for a larger painting also now in Boston.