Jean-François Millet

The artist's studio (and sold, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 10-11, 1875, lot 112)
Goupil & Cie, Paris 
Mrs. Roland C. Lincoln, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (acquired from the above, 1877, and sold, American Art Association, New York, January 22, 1920, lot 10, illustrated) 
John Levy, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Newhouse Galleries, New York
William Westmann, Birmingham, Michigan 
George Bowdoin, Oyster Bay, New York
Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York (by 1974)
Mary Fisher, Cleveland, Ohio
Private Collection, Newport, Rhode Island (and sold, Sotheby's, New York, October 28, 1986, lot 22, illustrated)

Paper is hinged to back mat with two archival paper hinges at upper edge. Paper is time darkened. Some remnants of old adhesive visible along extreme perimeter of the front and the reverse. Slight rubbing of pastel at extreme edges, not visible when the work is framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

In the exceptionally reliable catalogue accompanying the sale of paintings and drawings that had remained in Jean-François Millet’s studio on his death in 1875, Petite Bergère Tricotant is given the date 1874, making the sunny, sparkling pastel very probably Millet’s last treatment of a theme that had compelled his attention again and again over his long career.   Although left unsigned – it was Millet’s custom not to sign a work until he sold it – and stamped with the initials applied by the artist’s executors to authenticate such works, Petite Bergère Tricotant is a finished pastel.  The open, airy composition, the soft coloring, and the fiddly, broken crayon marks that shape the grazing flock reflect Millet’s final redirection of his art in response to the dawning Impressionist movement and his own interest in a more direct, monumental figure style.

Shepherdesses appear in Millet’s art from his earliest years as a student or struggling new professional during the 1830s and they remained a favored subject all through his life.  Indeed, shepherdesses would provide the themes with which Millet finally broke through popular disdain toward his realistic peasant imagery at Salon exhibitions of the mid-1860s. However, Millet’s first shepherdesses, dressed in tightly laced bodices, decked with ribbons and seated among two or three very fluffy sheep, were figures of his imagination or interpretations of Rococo masterworks by Boucher and Fragonard.  Although he grew up working the land and most farming families of his rural Norman hamlet raised small flocks, the sheep of Millet’s youth were pastured in the small hedgerow-bound fields that covered coastal Normandy with no need of a steadfast guardian. Only on Millet’s move from Paris to Barbizon in 1849, when he was already deeply committed to an art of peasant imagery, did he actually encounter any of the young women who had tended France’s myriad flocks since well before the time of Joan of Arc.  As with much that was surprising, even shocking, about rural life on the edges of the vast Chailly Plain, the shepherdesses Millet crossed paths with daily required thoughtful study and understanding before they became the stuff of his art.  The loneliness and the boredom of their lives first puzzled, then disturbed him, as he realized that unlike his own daughters these girls would never be schooled, and they would grow up largely without social contact.   

The young shepherdesses of Barbizon began appearing in Millet’s art a year or two after his arrival, and the motifs that would become classic attributes of a Millet shepherdess: the heavy hooded cape, the shapeless knitting, and the tightly wrapped headscarf that was a Barbizon staple begin to come together in Millet’s drawings and paintings around 1854 – as in Shepherdess Seated on a Rock  (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, fig. 1).  For twenty years, Millet would depict similarly attired young shepherdesses in a wide range of Barbizon settings: driving their small flocks down the village street at daybreak, sheltering from cold or storm beside distinctive Barbizon windbreaks, or resting on the edge of the looming Forest of Fontainebleau.  In a small number of works, that characteristic young teenager might chatter happily with an attentive young cowherd, or she might exchange secrets with a second, similarly dressed young shepherdess as their flocks mingled nearby. But most often, Millet’s shepherdesses were a quiet, self-contained human presence, watching their animals, more to keep them from grazing in a restricted field than to keep predators at bay. Their task and their garb had hardly changed since Joan of Arc and Ste. Geneviève (protectress of Paris) had trod the Ile-de-France; and Millet seemed simultaneously to respect and to lament the fixed circumference of their lives.

The continuity of shepherdess imagery through Millet’s work makes those paintings and pastels an effective album of the changing influences, ambitions, and idiosyncracies that define his achievement.  Where the 1854 Shepherdess Seated on a Rock displays the precise landscape descriptions, saturated colors, and complex textures that marked what would become known as Barbizon landscape painting style,  Petite Bergère Tricotant reduces background elements to a minimum, emphasizes instead the features and the presence of a dominating figure, and expresses the whole with a very personalized vocabulary of crayon and pastel marks.  In 1874, the aging Millet was not merely master of his own subject matter and style, but confidently aware of both the developing Impressionistic movement and the hints of a new symbolism that would undercut his own realism.

Petite Bergère Tricotant was acquired in 1877 by Mrs. Roland C. Lincoln, a prominent Boston collector who was part of the circle of French painting enthusiasts who, working both together and independently, brought more than forty pastels and pastel drawings by Millet to the city in little more than a decade after the artist’s death.   Mrs. Lincoln also once owned Le Bouleau Mort  (Musée des Beaux Arts, Dijon,) and La Sortie (Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh).

Two preparatory drawings are known for Petite Bergère Tricotant, both outline studies of the shepherdess, stressing how carefully Millet worked and reworked even his most familiar figures.  One, in the Cabinet des dessins (Musée du Louvre, Paris, R.F.5737), has been mistakenly identified with an earlier Millet painting of a similar standing shepherdess, the second has been lost since 1920.