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  • Jean-Francois Millet
    Oct 4, 1814 - Jan 20, 1875
  • Pastures In Normandy - Jean-François Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers; he can be categorized as part of the naturalism and realism movements. As a painter of melancholy scenes of peasant labor, he has been considered a social realist. Millet's paintings are noted for their power and simplicity of drawing.
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Pastures In Normandy
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  • Pastures In Normandy

  • Jean-Francois Millet
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  • circa 1854
    pen and brown ink with watercolor

    Pastures in Normandy was drawn by Jean-Francois Millet during a return visit to his native Gruchy, outside Cherbourg, probably in 1854 when he spent the summer re-familiarizing himself with the countryside of his youth.

    Uncommonly large among Millet's watercolors, Pastures in Normandy represents a series of small fields divided by hedgerows and recalls the hillsides southeast of coastal Gruchy. Although Millet's use of watercolor for landscape drawing is generally associated with his visits to the Vichy region during 1866-68 (the present drawing has traditionally been titled Landscape near Vichy), he began combining watercolor washes and brown ink for landscape studies during an earlier stay in Normandy. Such drawings allowed Millet to rapidly record the characteristic hues and textures of sites that he hoped to utilize at a later date back in Barbizon as settings for scenes of peasant life. The large page size, a somewhat bluer range of foliage colors, and the colored sky distinguish this watercolor from Millet's 1860s Vichy drawings.

    Pastures in Normandy is stamped at lower left with the J.F. Millet cachet used to authenticate the more important works on paper found in the estate of Millet's widow at her death in 1894. The present landscape very probably corresponds to lot 13 in the widow's sale, a watercolor entitled Prie en Normandie, despite a difference in dimensions. That sale catalogue apparently listed the design dimensions rather than the slightly larger dimensions of the overall sheet.

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Other paintings by Jean-Francois Millet:

Oedipus Taken Down from the Tree
Oedipus Taken Down from the Tree
Offering to Pan
Offering to Pan
Path through the Chestnut Trees, Cusset
Path through the Chestnut Trees, Cusset
Path through the Wheat
Path through the Wheat
Jean-Francois MilletJean-François Millet, who settled in Barbizon late in 1849, was born into a farming family. Trained with an academic painter in Paris, Millet devoted his early work to portraits and erotic nudes. He was sensitive to the changes brought about by the increasing urbanisation and industrialisation of France, and he was particularly inspired by the social issues raised by the Revolution of 1848. Thereafter he turned to scenes of peasants labouring, endowing them with heroic form adapted from the art of the past.

Unprecedented in French art, such works by Millet as The Sower were particularly controversial in the political climate of the time. Powerful and monumental, Millet's sower strides across a newly plowed field with energy and resolution, scattering the seeds for a new crop; he serves as an emblem of regeneration and of the elemental relationship between man and nature. Crude in appearance, the work provoked commentary not only on its subject matter but also on its styles and unorthodox technique. Théophile Gauteier, a famous nineteenth-century critic working for a government newspaper, noted that Millet "trowels on top of his dishcloth of a canvas, without oil or turpentine, vast masonries of coloured paint so dry that no varnish could quench its thirst". Political conservatives, who viewed the peasants as a potentially disruptive social element, attacked Millet, while liberals praised his ennoblement of rural life.

A nostalgia for an existence that was a dying phenomenon eventually made Millet's works some of the most famous images of their day. His paintings were exhibited widely, and he was revered on both sides of the Atlantic.

When Millet died in 1875, he was buried at Barbizon, next to Théodore Rousseau.