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Lot Essay
Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail is Millet's third, distinct version of a theme that deeply absorbed him during the second half of the 1850s, a country housewife returning from a local well, carrying a pail (or pails) of water with which to prepare her family's dinner. Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail, completed around 1860, is the only one of those scenes in which the Barbizon villageoise also carries a bundle of firewood with which to heat that soup.
Millet seldom provided explanations for his paintings or tried to control their interpretation, but a year or two after finishing Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail, he went to some length to be sure a city writer understood his intentions in a later version of the same year: 'I tried to make it impossible for anyone to take her for a simple water-carrier or just a servant; [I wanted them to see] that she has just come from drawing water for her own household, water with which to make soup for her husband and her children; that she is carrying only the weight, no more, no less, of full buckets; that beyond the slight grimace on her face from the strain of load and beyond the squinting of her eyes in the sunlight, one might read on her face a sense of well-being. As always, I avoided, with horror, anything that would be seen as sentimental. I wanted, instead, that she should be doing a task just like any other household chore, with simplicity and good will, not as a burden, an everyday act that was the custom of her life. And I wanted them to feel the coolness of the well and its great age and all the many women who had come there before her to draw water' (Millet to Théophile Thoré, 18 February 1862).
Millet was working on his composition of women returning from the well during the same years that he created The Gleaners (Musée D'Orsay, Paris) and The Man with a Hoe (Getty Museum, Los Angeles, fig. 1); and just as he was determined that those large Salon pictures should challenge social myths about economic well-being in the countryside, so was he committed to using his pictures for private collectors to quietly correct the smaller urban misunderstandings about daily life in rural France. Behind Millet's many pictures of women carrying water lay centuries of popular songs and images that depicted village wells as gathering places for idle gossips or (even more patronizingly) as trysting sites for naive young women briefly escaping vigilant mothers - a suggestion popularized by Greuze in the previous century and exploited to great profit by Bouguereau in the years after Millet's paintings. As Millet's description of his painting suggests, he was quite aware of the simple pleasures of village life that accompanied its simpler ways.
Among Millet's many 1850's Barbizon pictures, Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail is notable for the particular beauty of its soft green and golden-brown color scheme, and for its careful finish. The muted turquoise of the woman's marmotte (a tightly wrapped headscarf), repeated at her neckline and in the water splashing in her pail and echoed in the grayer tints of the moss-covered well and woodpile, is an unusual color note for Millet. It is perfectly balanced by the small touches of orange-brown in his villager's skirt, the coppery rim of her bucket out in the rope faintly visible in the distant window of the well.
Millet developed the composition for Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail in several preliminary drawings. In a fragmentary compositional sketch (Cabinet des dessins, Musée du Louvre, GM 10312, fig. 2) Millet silhouetted his housewife against the wall of her home, while in a second composition he studied her from the side, stepping onto the threshold of that home (same, GM 10722). In the finished painting he reverted to an apparently earlier scheme, with the housewife walking toward the viewer (same, GM 10495). Painted variants, all depicting women carrying two pails are: The Water Carrier (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, fig. 3) and Woman with Pails (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) which precede the present work; and Woman Returning from the Well (private collection, Japan) which follows it.
Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail is painted on an oak panel that is stamped with the name Luniot-Ganne. Edouard Luniot was the son-in-law of Barbizon's famous innkeeper 'Père' Ganne. For several years he supplied prepared oak panels to Millet, Théodore Rousseau and the many artists who painted in the village and the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau.
We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for preparing this catalogue entry and for having confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Millet seldom provided explanations for his paintings or tried to control their interpretation, but a year or two after finishing Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail, he went to some length to be sure a city writer understood his intentions in a later version of the same year: 'I tried to make it impossible for anyone to take her for a simple water-carrier or just a servant; [I wanted them to see] that she has just come from drawing water for her own household, water with which to make soup for her husband and her children; that she is carrying only the weight, no more, no less, of full buckets; that beyond the slight grimace on her face from the strain of load and beyond the squinting of her eyes in the sunlight, one might read on her face a sense of well-being. As always, I avoided, with horror, anything that would be seen as sentimental. I wanted, instead, that she should be doing a task just like any other household chore, with simplicity and good will, not as a burden, an everyday act that was the custom of her life. And I wanted them to feel the coolness of the well and its great age and all the many women who had come there before her to draw water' (Millet to Théophile Thoré, 18 February 1862).
Millet was working on his composition of women returning from the well during the same years that he created The Gleaners (Musée D'Orsay, Paris) and The Man with a Hoe (Getty Museum, Los Angeles, fig. 1); and just as he was determined that those large Salon pictures should challenge social myths about economic well-being in the countryside, so was he committed to using his pictures for private collectors to quietly correct the smaller urban misunderstandings about daily life in rural France. Behind Millet's many pictures of women carrying water lay centuries of popular songs and images that depicted village wells as gathering places for idle gossips or (even more patronizingly) as trysting sites for naive young women briefly escaping vigilant mothers - a suggestion popularized by Greuze in the previous century and exploited to great profit by Bouguereau in the years after Millet's paintings. As Millet's description of his painting suggests, he was quite aware of the simple pleasures of village life that accompanied its simpler ways.
Among Millet's many 1850's Barbizon pictures, Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail is notable for the particular beauty of its soft green and golden-brown color scheme, and for its careful finish. The muted turquoise of the woman's marmotte (a tightly wrapped headscarf), repeated at her neckline and in the water splashing in her pail and echoed in the grayer tints of the moss-covered well and woodpile, is an unusual color note for Millet. It is perfectly balanced by the small touches of orange-brown in his villager's skirt, the coppery rim of her bucket out in the rope faintly visible in the distant window of the well.
Millet developed the composition for Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail in several preliminary drawings. In a fragmentary compositional sketch (Cabinet des dessins, Musée du Louvre, GM 10312, fig. 2) Millet silhouetted his housewife against the wall of her home, while in a second composition he studied her from the side, stepping onto the threshold of that home (same, GM 10722). In the finished painting he reverted to an apparently earlier scheme, with the housewife walking toward the viewer (same, GM 10495). Painted variants, all depicting women carrying two pails are: The Water Carrier (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, fig. 3) and Woman with Pails (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) which precede the present work; and Woman Returning from the Well (private collection, Japan) which follows it.
Woman Carrying Firewood and a Pail is painted on an oak panel that is stamped with the name Luniot-Ganne. Edouard Luniot was the son-in-law of Barbizon's famous innkeeper 'Père' Ganne. For several years he supplied prepared oak panels to Millet, Théodore Rousseau and the many artists who painted in the village and the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau.
We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for preparing this catalogue entry and for having confirmed the authenticity of this work.