Animals Grazing on the Edge of a Pine Forest, Vosges was drawin by Millet during the winter of 1868-69, one of only two finished works to result from the artist's autumn trip to the Vosges mountains of northeastern France. Racording a terrain very different from his familiar Chailly Plain, Animals Grazing... sparkles with rich greens, blue-grays, and acidic yellows that are quite distinct from the palette Millet employed for his Barbizon subjects. And in the boldness of the pastel toches defining the ruffled waters, the sunstruck edges of bristling pine trees, or the half-hidden animals, Millet displayed a virtuosity of technique that is often overlooked in our fascination with his peasant subjects.

In our day as in his own, Millet's reputation has been largely defined by the oil paintings he exhibited at the Salon during the 1850's and 1860's. Nevertheless, as a few especially astute observers (the Goncourt brothers and Van Gogh among them) realized, Millet is without question one of the greatest pastel draughtsmen of all time. He fist employed the pastel medium during the early 1840's, when he favored Rococo subject matter and a painterly eighteenth-century technique of rubbed and blended surfaces. As realistic themes dominated his art in the 1850's, Millet shifted to drawing almost entirely in black crayon. Color did not make a sustained reappearance in his drawings until about 1860 and it was several years before he began again to create significant pastel drawings.

Then, spurred by a eager, supportive collector, Millet experimented with an increasingly free and linear pastel application, reworking earlier figural themes with a newfound interest in light and atmosphere, and exploring landscape subjects with unaccustomed devotion. From 1866 to 1870, pastel drawing was the principal focus of Millet's artistic energies and the prime venue for his developing experiments with color. As he mastered the difficulties of drawing direcly in color, Millet brought the assertive, individualistic style that had long characterized his small sketches to his large, finished compositions. The intensity of color and the assurance of draughtsmanship in Animals Grazing... demonstrate clearly Millet's crucial role in the transition from the conventions of Barbizon landscape art to the Impressionism of the 1870's.

Millet, who seldom left Barbizon, traveled to the Alsace region during September, 1868, at the invitation of a wealthy industrialist, Frédéric Hartmann, who hoped to prod the artist into producing paintings of Hartmann's homeland. Hartmann had been a patron of the landscapist Théodore Rousseau, Millet's closest friend in Barbizon; and on Rousseau's death the preceding winter, Hartmann has commissioned Millet to complete landscapes left unfinished by Rousseau. That task may well have helped consolidate Millet's developing interest in landscape art during the second half of the 1860's.

Trained as a figure painter at the École des Beaux-Arts, deeply comitted to depicting the laboring lives of his peasant neighbors, and perhaps also a bit daunted by the great landscapists with whom he lived and worked in Barbizon, Millet came only slowly to pure landscape painting. During the 1850's, the settings of his pictures of agricultural laborers or forest workers -- however beautifully colored -- were clearly subordinated to his carfully observed figures. Only gradually, during the early 1860's, did the backgrounds of such well known paintings as the MAn with the Hoe (Malibu, Getty Museum) or Planting Potatoes (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) take on a richness of hue and a complexity of texture that could compete with the laboring peasants for the viewer's attention. Finally, during the summers of 1866 and 1867, Millet spent several weeks in Vichy accompanying his ailing wife to the spa there. While she took medicinal treatments, Millet wandered the mountains and pastures nearby, making hundred of small sketches in the most concentrated effort at landscape observation in his career. The impact of Vichy's gullied hillsides and the volcanic terrain of the Auvergne mountains, rising heavily all around him or dropping precipitously away without visual warning, forced Millet to rethink the conventions of his landscape compositions; and the necessity of drawing rapidly, to record unfamiliar spaces, textures and colors in a tourist's limited time, pushed Millet to a new level of vision and craftsmanship. Back in Barbizon, he devoted his winters to realizing many of the Vichy drawings in pastel, a medium that allowed him to recreate the challenge of the original drawing experience.

The mountainous terrain of Animals Grazing... clearly relates the pastel to several of Millet's Vichy images, but there can be no mistake about the subject, for the work is one of the most securely documented of Millet's pastels -- a letter from Millet to his patron indicated that he began work on the pastel in late October 1868 (archives, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), shortly after returning from the Vosges region; and a tiny sketch of grazing donkeys (ink over pencil, 10.7 x 15.5cm., Art Institute of Chicago) records the initial observation that was expanded into a dramatic hillside of broken trees and wandering animals. A handwritten list in the Durand-Ruel archives indicates the pastel was awaiting delivery in the summer of 1870.

Ironically, although Hartmann had sponsored the trip to the Vosges Mountains, it was his rival, Emile Gavet, who claimed the two pastels that resulted (the second, Pasture in the Vosges Mountains, belongs to the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum, Kofu). Gavet was an architect who made a fortune speculating in Parisian real estate and an avid collector, amassing important collections of Old Master paintings and Renaissance decorative arts in addition to his collection of Babizon works. Gavet had begun acquiring Millet's painitngs during the early 1860's, and at one point he owned the Angelus, during the automn of 1865, he visited Millet in Barbizon and persuaded the painter to produce drawings and subsequently pastels more or less exclusively for Gavet in exchange for a monthly stipend. Eventually, Gavet acquired ninety-five pastels and highly finished drawings by Millet, many of which were exhibited for the first time after Millet's death in 1875, prompting a number of critics to greatly revise their view of Millet as an artist, and leading the young Van Gogh to raptures.

The most formidable buyer at the sale of Gavet's collection was Quincy Adams Shaw, one of Boston's wealthiest citizens and an ardent collector of Barbizon art (he had visited Millet in 1867 with the American painter William Morris Hunt, and owned numerous paintings by Corot, Rousseau, Troyon, etc.). Animals Grazing was one of 23 works Shaw acquired from the Gavet collection, nearly all of which, along with 25 paintings by Millet, were given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on Shaw's death. There, along with pastels acquired at the Gavet sale by other Bostonians, they form the greatest collection of Millet's pastels anywhere. Shaw's family kept his numerous Millet drawings for division among his heirs, as well as Animals Grazing..., the only Millet pastel to remain in the Shaw family.

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