Jean-François Millet

Probably, Emile Gavet, Paris (commissioned from the artist, circa 1866-68 and sold: Paris. Hôtel Drouot, June 11-12, 1875, lot 62)
Private Collection, Huntington, Long Island, New York (since circa 1950s)
Gifted to the present owners in 2006
 

Paris, Rue Saint-Georges, no. 7, Dessins de Millet provenant de la collection de M. G., April-May,1875, no. 21 (as Jardin de paysan)

Etienne Moreau-Nelaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, Paris, 1921, vol. II, p. 38, fig. 128 (as Le grand frère, and incorrectly dated to 1858)

Edges laid down on stretched paper, colors are bright and fresh.
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Ravishing in the complexity of its color and shifting light effects and completely compelling in the mundane details of its charming subject, Le grand frère marks an undisputable high point in Jean-François Millet's pastel oeuvre.  All the more surprising, then, that this immensely appealing glimpse into Millet's own family courtyard should have been lost from public view since its single appearance in a memorial exhibition following the artist's death in 1875.  Presented here for the first time in almost a century and a half, Le grand frère affirms Millet's heartfelt belief that the simplest subjects might convey the deepest truths.  While it often trivializes the Barbizon masters to characterize them as "predecessors of Impressionism", Le grand frère testifies to Millet's confident command--as early as 1868--of the very issues that would absorb his younger colleagues a decade later.

Millet is rightfully celebrated as the master painter of the peasant, the vibrant voice claiming recognition for hard-worn field laborers and ragged wood-cutters.  But well before his sowers and gleaners so unsettled the audiences of the Paris Salon, Millet was simultaneously studying the smaller moments of his own family and Barbizon neighbors, tracing the daily satisfactions and quiet intimacies that held together lives of great difficulty.  When critical antipathy made his more politically complex paintings unsalable, Millet relied on black crayon drawings of such family scenes as his principal source of income.  The imagery of Le grand frère was born in the harsh years of the late 1850s, for the young boy protectively nestling his younger sibling is almost certainly Millet's son François (born 1849) and the swaddled infant either daughter Emélie (born 1856) or second son Charles (born 1857). Two small studies featuring an older infant in a gown belong to the Louvre (see: Étude pour Le grand frère, circa 1858, Musée du Louvre, Paris).

A decade of contemplating and re-configuring a beloved subject led Millet around 1866-68 to include Le grand frère among the sixty-some pastels that he produced as a private commission for Emile Gavet, a Parisian architect and collector--this time broadening the scene and carefully adding garden elements and the sun-struck view through the gate that reflected his developing landscape interests. When a portion of Gavet's extraordinary collection was exhibited in homage to the recently deceased artist, Le grand frère was among the selection that prompted the young Vincent van Gogh to a rapturous admiration that he cherished for the rest of his own life.