Jean-François Millet

Nicolas M. Acquavella Galleries, New York
Acquired from the above, December 1947

This drawing has recently been removed from a support backing, and is hinged to an archival board. It does not present tears or paper losses. The extreme edges of the paper appear darker in tone, likely from direct contact with the previous support. Close examination reveals old, scattered spots of white inpainting throughout the image.
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Jean-François Millet drew Les planteurs de pommes de terre in 1859-60, bringing to completion a powerful composition of a Barbizon family at work that he had pondered in numerous small sketches since soon after his arrival in the farming community some ten years earlier.  It was the precise interaction of the figures, as the husband cleaved up a hoeful of soil and his wife dropped in a small handful of potato seedlings from her apron, that challenged Millet.  With Les planteurs de pommes de terre he found the specific poses, as well as the ancillary elements, that could balance a vast landscape and capture the complexities of poverty amid plenty and the redemptive dignity of hard work that were at the very heart of his art. 

Two years earlier, Millet had made the rich, wheat-growing plains of the Chailly region which encompasses Barbizon immortal with his Gleaners (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).  In that painting an immense, glowing harvest gathered up by dozens of day laborers contrasts with three exhausted women scrabbling for stray stalks of grain.  Here, in Les planteurs de pommes de terre, those same fields stretch out behind the potato planting couple, resting fallow from the winter.  Spring has only begun to bring new growth to the fruit trees that mark an old property line; and the strongly angled sun that just lightly colors the shoulders and hips of this laboring pair indicates that they have risen very early to work this small patch of abandoned field, quite a ways from the distant village just discernible over the woman’s shoulder.  What they plant is not the valuable grain crop that would feed Paris (and which they had probably helped harvest in The Gleaners) but food for their own family, a humbler lot of root vegetables.  Potatoes were still commonly dismissed as mere animal fodder in France, but Millet was well aware the vegetable had become the staple starch of many working farm families.  His struggle with ordering the composition of Les planteurs de pommes de terre reflects his own effort to understand the fundamental changes reordering the French countryside.  (The solitary young girl who trails her single cow off in the distance reprises the subject of Millet’s much-maligned Salon submission of 1859, Woman Pasturing her Cow (Musée de l’Ain, Bourg-en-Bresse), a concurrent effort to document change in the heartland).

But while poverty underlies Les planteurs de pommes de terre, Millet’s principal concern is to show the strength of the bond that orchestrates the lives of this couple: this man with a hoe walks slowly forward, opening holes in the soil as his wife cautiously steps backward while dropping her seedlings.  Their own stake in the land is given particular resonance with the sleeping child tucked into one of the paniers in which the donkey had carried the seedling potatoes. Millet was not particularly religious, but he certainly recognized the centuries of Holy Family imagery behind any depiction of a young couple, a child and a donkey, and he didn’t shy away from it.

Nothing is known of the history of Les planteurs de pommes de terre, which has been lost and unpublished;  but the size of the work and the complexity of Millet’s technique attest to the drawing’s significance for him in 1860.  Since the mid-1850s, his exhibited paintings had brought increasing opprobrium at each Salon and he was forced to rely more and more on the sale of drawings to support his own family.  Difficult as that was, Millet developed a small core of committed collectors for these more intimate works.  He rewarded their appreciation with a deeply personal method that utilized sophisticated layering of black crayon marks, softened with stumping and hatching, to shape his admirable figures and to celebrate the half-light landscapes and interiors that he favored.  In Les planteurs de pommes de terre, the unusual depths of tone that keep his solid figures carefully situated in the distinctly deep Chailly landscape are subtly accented by a few well worked areas of color.  A bit of blue, a hint of mustard are slipped almost deceptively into the matrix of black and grey mark-making to reward the careful eye.