Both sides of this sheet, torn from a pocket notebook -- the binding holes are still visible along one edge -- can be dated to 1849-50, just after Jean-François Millet's arrival in Barbizon from Paris. The landscape probably depicts the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, to either side of the village of Barbizon, where an area of kitchen gardens and open wasteland separated the Forest from the great Plain of Chailly. Millet mastered the complexities of Forest landscape only slowly, and areas such as this, where untamed forest met cleared farmland, provided the setting for many of his first drawings of shepherdesses and faggot-gatherers during the early 1850's.

The verso is a study for the right arm of The Sower, a project on which Millet worked for several years, prior to exhibiting the painting (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) at the Salon of 1850-51. The drawing has the crispness and summary execution which one associates with Millet's life studies of the early 1850s. The shadowy image across the arm is an inadvertent counterproof - an image transferred by rubbing -- of the striding legs of the sower, which were apparently drawn on the adjacent notebook page, with the notebook turned 180 .

We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.