Jean François MILLET - Lot 81

Jean François MILLET (Gruchy 1814 - Barbizon 1875) Peasant couple contemplating the sea Paper pasted on cardboard 23.5 x 19.5 cm Signed lower right J.F. Millet Label on reverse Durand Ruel N°69 on reverse Provenance : Durand Ruel. Alexandra Murphy places our painting around 1845, when Jean-François Millet was working in Le Havre and Cherbourg, or around 1846/47 when he returned to Paris. We know that in Le Havre he painted portraits and various pictures, including pastoral idylls, and that before returning to Paris he held a public sale of his works. During this period, he became increasingly involved in mythological and religious paintings, which he regularly exhibited at the Salon. At the same time, he was painting naturalistic scenes centered on characters caught in a moment of ordinary life. Gradually, this type of representation became more and more important in his career, and at the 1848 Salon he presented Le Vanneur (see catalog of the Millet exhibition, Paris, 2017, n°21, reproduced). A drawing (in the Alexandre Young collection in 1906, now lost) featured the same postures. The artist wrote in a letter in 1851: "There are [...] in my paintings in train neither nude women, nor mythological subjects: I want to impose myself with something other than these subjects [...] it is the human side, frankly human that touches me most in art, and if I could do what I would like, or at least attempt it, I would do nothing that was not the result of an impression received by the aspect of nature, either in landscape, or in figures". The attribution was confirmed on photographs in 2008 by Alexandra Murphy.