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Lot Essay
Jean-François Millet painted Wooded Hillside near Vichy during one of his summer visits to the Auvergne region of south-central France in either 1866 and 1867. The watercolor originally formed part of one of the small notebooks Millet carried on his daily trips into the countryside around Vichy.
Wooded Hillside near Vichy displays the eccentric composition and the wealth of foliage textures that are hallmarks of Millet's Vichy work. The Vichy landscape captivated the artist with vistas that recalled the rolling hillsides and hedgerow-lined meadows of his native Normandy. At the same time, the once-volcanic terrain introduced him to new color schemes and organizational structures quite unlike the flat plains of Barbizon. In Vichy, Millet threw himself into pure landscape drawing for the first time in his life. He sketched dozens of sites in pencil during the day, developing shorthand marks for different trees and types of ground cover, often adding written notes on colors and plants. In the evening, back in the inn with his wife, Millet worked up the day's drawings with ink, favoring a soft reed pen that allowed both sharp, crisp marks and broad, pooling lines. Then (or later back in Barbizon) he finished up favored drawings with watercolors. Annotations guided his color choices: several 'v's scattered across Wooded Hillside near Vichy stand for vert (green), while the word bled, faintly visible twice across the foreground is an archaic form of blé or wheat, a verbal allusion to the ancient, timeless character Millet admired in the isolated Vichy farmlands.
We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for preparing this catalogue entry. entry.
Wooded Hillside near Vichy displays the eccentric composition and the wealth of foliage textures that are hallmarks of Millet's Vichy work. The Vichy landscape captivated the artist with vistas that recalled the rolling hillsides and hedgerow-lined meadows of his native Normandy. At the same time, the once-volcanic terrain introduced him to new color schemes and organizational structures quite unlike the flat plains of Barbizon. In Vichy, Millet threw himself into pure landscape drawing for the first time in his life. He sketched dozens of sites in pencil during the day, developing shorthand marks for different trees and types of ground cover, often adding written notes on colors and plants. In the evening, back in the inn with his wife, Millet worked up the day's drawings with ink, favoring a soft reed pen that allowed both sharp, crisp marks and broad, pooling lines. Then (or later back in Barbizon) he finished up favored drawings with watercolors. Annotations guided his color choices: several 'v's scattered across Wooded Hillside near Vichy stand for vert (green), while the word bled, faintly visible twice across the foreground is an archaic form of blé or wheat, a verbal allusion to the ancient, timeless character Millet admired in the isolated Vichy farmlands.
We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for preparing this catalogue entry. entry.