Jean-François Millet

Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente Veuve Millet (the artist's widow), April 24-25, 1894, no. 10
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, October 25, 2005, lot 130, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Striplined; a few very tiny pigment losses near the lower left edge. The charcoal appears possibly rubbed to areas of the figure but may be due to the artist's technique. Strip lined. Under UV: inpainting apparent along a horizontal band about 1 inch in width to fill in many very tiny areas of loss but none near the signature.
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Peasant Holding a Winnowing Basket was drawn by Jean-François Millet around 1868-1870, as he began a group of paintings presenting uncommonly direct images of peasant farmers and their families.  The commanding presence of the winnower, willingly posing with his immense, shallow basket, offers a stronger, more aggressive view of a French farmer than had Millet's ground-breaking scene of a winnower actually sifting grain some twenty years earlier (London, National Gallery).  Left unfinished in the wake of the increasing ill-health that led to Millet's untimely death in 1875, Peasant Holding a Winnowing Basket — along with a similarly sized peasant holding a flail, (Cabinet des dessins, Musée du Louvre) and a slightly larger, partially painted, scene of a peasant man and wife standing side-by-side, laced together by the arms of their young child (Cardiff, National Museum of Wales) — provides an intriguing glimpse into Millet's turn toward a more confrontational imagery.  Drawn with a simplicity that borders on brutality, but which never sinks to caricature, these late Millet peasant figures testify to the confidence with which Millet reinvented his art, just as his long-denied popular acceptance was determinedly sentimentalizing the provocation out of his earlier peasant images.