Lot Essay
A sower striding through the gathering twilight as he scatters the seeds of future harvests is probably the most enduring image created by Jean-François Millet, a figure copied or paraphrased by dozens of subsequent artists -- revered by Vincent Van Gogh, endlessly adapted by anonymous commercial illustrators. In this 1860s version of his famous composition, Millet achieved an especially beautiful expression of the theme, working a range of pastel colors of great delicacy and subtlety into and over a black crayon drawing of complete assurance. The broken soil, the flight of crows, and the laboring peasant are unified in an atmosphere of palpable cold, won from a complex web of softened hues and distinctive chalk marks.
Millet first presented his figure of a sower in the politically charged atmosphere of the 1850-51 Salon, with the large painting now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Heralded as both a 'modern Demos' celebrating the new electoral might of the common man and as an agent of revolution sowing dissent, Millet's sower combined a myriad of inherited images with the vitality born of deeply felt personal experiences. At least three or four years of working and reworking his composition lay behind the carefully counterbalanced gestures of seeds sailing from an outflung arm and the forward motion of the sower's steady stride. For that dark painting, Millet isolated his powerful figure against an empty hillside (often considered a recollection of Millet's native Normandy), hiding the sower's face in the shadow of his hat. Such a composition created an air of mystery and emphasized the symbolic interpretations of the action and the actor, inviting the political implications attached to it by right and left alike.
But as with so many of the subjects that were most important in his oeuvre, Millet continued to rework the theme of the sower throughout the 1850s. When he returned to the subject once again around 1865-66, he rejected the dramatic overtones of the earlier painting in favor of a more realistic presentation and a landscape setting directly taken from his life in Barbizon. In a group of drawings and pastels that culminates in the present version of The Sower, Millet retained the eloquent pose he had refined for the sower some fifteen years earlier, as well as the harrower and team closing the seeded furrows in the background. A flock of predatory crows still descends upon the fallen seed. But now Millet opened up the background, placing the sower against a broad sweep of rising fields that ends in an old telegraph tower that identifies the site as the Plain of Chailly, outside Barbizon. Although the hour remains twilight, Millet used the last angled rays of sun, reflected off the fields, to reveal the sower's carefully drawn face; and the textured, clod-strewn field, the distant wasteland around the tower, and the sower himself are woven together with quiet colors that melt into the graying evening.
Millet drew this version of The Sower for Emile Gavet, a Parisian architect and developer, who made himself the principal patron for the artist's pastels during the second half of the 1860s. Gavet encouraged Millet to commit himself fully to drawing and he provided a monthly stipend (as well as special drawing papers) in exchange for the artist's entire production of pastels. Although Millet bristled at the notion of exclusivity that Gavet demanded, he nonetheless found the collector a sympathetic and supportive patron and over five years he created for Gavet nearly one hundred pastels and drawings of exceptional beauty. The pastels Millet made for Gavet included both new compositions and reworked versionsof favorite subjects of the 1850s. The present pastel of the Sower composition was probably drawn in 1866 or 1867, at the height of Millet's pastel production. Millet attained a particularly delicate balance between black line and color in The Sower, with an exceptional range of greens, blues, browns, and creams intricately interwoven within the hatching and shaping black marks. The Sower is the most carefully realized of four reasonably contemporary pastels depicting a sower on the Plain of Chailly, and the subtlety of color and the command of space that characterize the present drawing suggest that it is probably the final version of the theme. Two vertically-oriented compositions are known (Williamstown, Clark Art Institute and Pittsburgh, Frick Art Museum) and another, more loosely drawn, horizontal version, nearly identical in composition (Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery).
During the years following Millet's death in 1875, The Sower appeared in three particularly influential exhibitions that were crucial not only in securing the artist's reputation as a major force in nineteenth-century French painting, but even more critical in revealing his importance as a draughtsman. The Sower was among the pastels from the Gavet collection exhibited in 1875 and was included in both the Millet retrospective at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1887 and the "Exposition centennale" of French art that capped the grand Exposition Universelle of 1889. Millet's drawings and pastels had not been exhibited during his lifetime and had been known primarily to a small group of collectors and fellow artists. During the 1880s, even conservative critics acknowledged Millet's inventiveness as a draughtsman and called special attention to his power as a 'fusainist' --the term used to describe mastery of the subtle charcoal-like shadings of his great black crayon drawings.
During the early 1890s, The Sower belonged to Constant-Benoît Coquelin, one of the most famous actors of the Comédie Française in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. Coquelin ainé (to distinguish him from a younger brother who was also an actor) was a committed art collector and patron of contemporary painters. In a portrait of Coquelin by Emile Friant (French, 1863-1932), The Sower is depicted hanging over the fireplace, in the center of an art- filled wall of the actor's study.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
Millet first presented his figure of a sower in the politically charged atmosphere of the 1850-51 Salon, with the large painting now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Heralded as both a 'modern Demos' celebrating the new electoral might of the common man and as an agent of revolution sowing dissent, Millet's sower combined a myriad of inherited images with the vitality born of deeply felt personal experiences. At least three or four years of working and reworking his composition lay behind the carefully counterbalanced gestures of seeds sailing from an outflung arm and the forward motion of the sower's steady stride. For that dark painting, Millet isolated his powerful figure against an empty hillside (often considered a recollection of Millet's native Normandy), hiding the sower's face in the shadow of his hat. Such a composition created an air of mystery and emphasized the symbolic interpretations of the action and the actor, inviting the political implications attached to it by right and left alike.
But as with so many of the subjects that were most important in his oeuvre, Millet continued to rework the theme of the sower throughout the 1850s. When he returned to the subject once again around 1865-66, he rejected the dramatic overtones of the earlier painting in favor of a more realistic presentation and a landscape setting directly taken from his life in Barbizon. In a group of drawings and pastels that culminates in the present version of The Sower, Millet retained the eloquent pose he had refined for the sower some fifteen years earlier, as well as the harrower and team closing the seeded furrows in the background. A flock of predatory crows still descends upon the fallen seed. But now Millet opened up the background, placing the sower against a broad sweep of rising fields that ends in an old telegraph tower that identifies the site as the Plain of Chailly, outside Barbizon. Although the hour remains twilight, Millet used the last angled rays of sun, reflected off the fields, to reveal the sower's carefully drawn face; and the textured, clod-strewn field, the distant wasteland around the tower, and the sower himself are woven together with quiet colors that melt into the graying evening.
Millet drew this version of The Sower for Emile Gavet, a Parisian architect and developer, who made himself the principal patron for the artist's pastels during the second half of the 1860s. Gavet encouraged Millet to commit himself fully to drawing and he provided a monthly stipend (as well as special drawing papers) in exchange for the artist's entire production of pastels. Although Millet bristled at the notion of exclusivity that Gavet demanded, he nonetheless found the collector a sympathetic and supportive patron and over five years he created for Gavet nearly one hundred pastels and drawings of exceptional beauty. The pastels Millet made for Gavet included both new compositions and reworked versionsof favorite subjects of the 1850s. The present pastel of the Sower composition was probably drawn in 1866 or 1867, at the height of Millet's pastel production. Millet attained a particularly delicate balance between black line and color in The Sower, with an exceptional range of greens, blues, browns, and creams intricately interwoven within the hatching and shaping black marks. The Sower is the most carefully realized of four reasonably contemporary pastels depicting a sower on the Plain of Chailly, and the subtlety of color and the command of space that characterize the present drawing suggest that it is probably the final version of the theme. Two vertically-oriented compositions are known (Williamstown, Clark Art Institute and Pittsburgh, Frick Art Museum) and another, more loosely drawn, horizontal version, nearly identical in composition (Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery).
During the years following Millet's death in 1875, The Sower appeared in three particularly influential exhibitions that were crucial not only in securing the artist's reputation as a major force in nineteenth-century French painting, but even more critical in revealing his importance as a draughtsman. The Sower was among the pastels from the Gavet collection exhibited in 1875 and was included in both the Millet retrospective at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1887 and the "Exposition centennale" of French art that capped the grand Exposition Universelle of 1889. Millet's drawings and pastels had not been exhibited during his lifetime and had been known primarily to a small group of collectors and fellow artists. During the 1880s, even conservative critics acknowledged Millet's inventiveness as a draughtsman and called special attention to his power as a 'fusainist' --the term used to describe mastery of the subtle charcoal-like shadings of his great black crayon drawings.
During the early 1890s, The Sower belonged to Constant-Benoît Coquelin, one of the most famous actors of the Comédie Française in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. Coquelin ainé (to distinguish him from a younger brother who was also an actor) was a committed art collector and patron of contemporary painters. In a portrait of Coquelin by Emile Friant (French, 1863-1932), The Sower is depicted hanging over the fireplace, in the center of an art- filled wall of the actor's study.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.