AFTER JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET CALLED FRANCISQUE | Figures resting in an Italianate landscape, with mountains and sea beyond

oil on canvas, unlined This painting is a later copy after the work by Jean François Millet, datable to around 1670, in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich (inv. no. 400).1 Millet was a Flemish-French landscape painter who specialised in Italianate landscapes, such as the present work, influenced by the likes of the classicising French Baroque artists Nicolas Poussin and Gaspard Dughet. Fascinatingly, according to the Dutch artist and biographer, Arnold Houbraken, Millet himself was an extremely accomplished copyist. He spent most of his short life in Paris and began his career by making copies after Old Masters and contemporary painters for the collector Everard Jabach (1618–95). Jabach's inventory drawn up at his death in 1695 records Millet's copies after works by the Carracci family, Guido Reni, Titian, Giulio Romano, and Poussin (which explains that artist's lasting influence on Millet's original paintings). Houbraken records Millet's remarkable memory for paintings and their details - he was apparently able to reproduce artworks extraordinarily quickly and accurately without needing to look at the original more than once! 1 https://www.sammlung.pinakothek.de/de/artist/jean-franois-millet-gen-francisque/italienische-kuestenlandschaft

All paintings available to view at the Sotheby’s Greenford Park warehouse, 5 - 7 and 10 – 13 September (10 - 4pm), by appointment. The canvas is unlined, the paint surface is dirty, and the varnish is very discoloured and uneven. There is a network of tears upper left in the mountain, which have been carefully repaired on the reverse of the canvas. A horizontal tear in the sky upper right has also been repaired with a patch on the reverse, as have a small horizontal tear just right of centre, one lower right, and one centre right. The network of craquelure has become more defined in the darks of the lower left corner, in the mountain, around the children, and in a handful of vertical lines running down the centre of the canvas. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals fine lines of retouching to all the aforementioned tears, and to parts of the network of craquelure, but little other intervention is discernible.
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