Jean-François Millet

Alfred Sensier (acquired from the artist and sold: his sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, December 10-18, 1877, lot 243)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, June 17, 1986, lot 69, illustrated

Paper stretched over board, slightly light struck. Visible flecks in paper weave with subtle spots of foxing through composition. A small nick to paper is visible above the woman's head at left which appears to have been touched up with chalk and a smal; inconsistency to the paper in the skirt of the woman at right which may be inherent to the paper.
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While Jean-François Millet is internationally revered for a trio of very well-known paintings—The Sower (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), The Angelus and The Gleaners (both Paris, Musée d’Orsay)— oil paintings in fact are only a part of his art. Behind each of those iconic paintings lie more than a dozen sketches, careful figure or costume studies or alternative compositions, such as Les Glaneuses (the preceding lot); and fortunately for collectors and scholars alike, new drawings adding to our understanding of Millet’s most important paintings still come to light every decade or so.  Against fewer than 400 finished paintings by Millet known today, there are some 600 finished drawings and pastels, and at least 2,000 more working sketches, detailed studies, and moody watercolor landscapes.  By training and by passion, Millet was a true peintre-dessinateur (painter-draftsman), one of the three truly brilliant draftsmen, with Delacroix before him and Degas to follow, who define nineteenth-century French art.

Millet drew more or less constantly, at the dinner table as often as in his studio; and frequently on the most incongruous pages: used envelopes, formal invitations and tally sheets for the evening domino game all bear sketches marking critical shifts in his thinking about a composition. After all, it was a drawing scratched on a wooden gate that is traditionally credited with convincing his family of his talent. Millet’s training in provincial Cherbourg, with a pair of academically prepared artists, followed by his years in the École des Beaux-Arts and studio of Paul Delaroche reinforced his natural inclination to study the human figure.

The collection of drawings offered here, seven sheets with nine individual subjects, covers nearly twenty-five years of Millet’s working life, his entire residence in Barbizon, and range from the tiny, almost indecipherable first thoughts for a shepherdess composition (lot 84, verso) to a wonderfully complete Barbizon gardening scene (lot 81).  Both the naturalistic details that fascinated him and the complicated problems of figure rendering that were so central to the power of his major paintings are on display here.

Laveuses à la fontaine is the earliest work in this group, straddling Millet’s last, difficult days in Paris in 1848 and his arrival in Barbizon in 1849.  The two young women washing heavy linens in a flowing stream (rather than the fountain or spring suggested by the traditional title) probably reflect an episode glimpsed during Millet’s treks out of Paris into the semi-rural woodlands around Saint Ouen, and demonstrate that his interest in women’s labors developed hand-in-hand with his contemporary images of The Winnower (London, National Gallery) and The Sower (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), his major Salon works around the Revolution of 1848.  Pairing two figures allowed Millet to explore both the strain and the grace inherent in the stages of the women’s task.  In his attention to the young woman rubbing her forehead or pushing aside a stray hair one senses the long hours of observation that underlay Millet’s search for such a telling gesture.  The open river bank and very cursory treeline across the top of the sheet serve primarily as a backdrop framing the washerwomen, and are a reminder that Millet was far less skilled as a landscape artist than as a figural draftsman at the beginning of the 1850s.