.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This large drawing of a solitary spinner at work is a preparatory study for the painting of The standing spinner in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (inv. 17.1499; Murphy, op. cit., no. 59). Both the painting (fig. 1) and the drawing were in the collection assembled by Quincy Adams Shaw and his wife Pauline Agassiz Shaw. While the painting was donated to the museum in Boston, the few drawings by Millet in the Shaw collection were kept by the family as they were intended as works of art to be appreciated more privately (Murphy, op. cit., p. xii). In the last decades of the 19th Century Quincy Adams Shaw had assembled one of the largest collections of works by Millet of his time. In a letter of 1872 Millet himself recorded a visit to his studio of Mr. and Mrs. Quincy Adam Shaw, ‘an American gentleman and a lady’ (cited in Quincy Adams Collection. Italian Renaissance Sculptures Paintings and Pastels by Jean-Francois Millet, exhib. cat., Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1918, p. 3). More than fifty works by Millet, consisting of paintings and pastels, were presented to the museum in Boston by Quincy Adams Shaw during his lifetime.
The theme of women spinning wool in an interior or outdoors occurs repeatedly in Millet’s work. In his day, spinning was a dying skill as by then fabrics were already produced industrially; however, the practice was still used in households in the countryside. But for Millet the activity also had a personal resonance; he associated it with his mother and grandmother as the sounds of women spinning and carding wool in his family home in Gruchy were some of Millet’s earliest memories (). While in 1849 the artist had moved to Barbizon, outside Paris, in the summer of 1854 he returned to Normandy for a seminal visit during which he recorded his childhood memories in the form of sketches. The present sheet has been dated around that time.
The figure of the young woman working at the large wheel was studied by Millet in multiple sketches which reveal the importance of the subject to the artist. On the verso of the present sheet is a stylized rendering of the same figure, only rapidly sketched with broad strokes of black chalk, while on the recto the young woman is depicted with precision, and more details have been added to the scene. Several small studies of the same figure are in the Louvre (Murphy, op. cit., p. 92, under no. 59). In those, the figure is depicted standing without the wheel (RF 5727, recto), seen from the back (RF 5729, recto) or frontally (RF 5728, recto).
Millet was an extremely prolific draftsman who began to draw early in his youth and continued throughout his career. From 1851 the artist began to sell his drawings to collectors, but thousands of studies and sketches were left in his studio upon his death (see R. Bacou, Millet dessins, Paris, 1975, pp. 9-18).
The theme of women spinning wool in an interior or outdoors occurs repeatedly in Millet’s work. In his day, spinning was a dying skill as by then fabrics were already produced industrially; however, the practice was still used in households in the countryside. But for Millet the activity also had a personal resonance; he associated it with his mother and grandmother as the sounds of women spinning and carding wool in his family home in Gruchy were some of Millet’s earliest memories (). While in 1849 the artist had moved to Barbizon, outside Paris, in the summer of 1854 he returned to Normandy for a seminal visit during which he recorded his childhood memories in the form of sketches. The present sheet has been dated around that time.
The figure of the young woman working at the large wheel was studied by Millet in multiple sketches which reveal the importance of the subject to the artist. On the verso of the present sheet is a stylized rendering of the same figure, only rapidly sketched with broad strokes of black chalk, while on the recto the young woman is depicted with precision, and more details have been added to the scene. Several small studies of the same figure are in the Louvre (Murphy, op. cit., p. 92, under no. 59). In those, the figure is depicted standing without the wheel (RF 5727, recto), seen from the back (RF 5729, recto) or frontally (RF 5728, recto).
Millet was an extremely prolific draftsman who began to draw early in his youth and continued throughout his career. From 1851 the artist began to sell his drawings to collectors, but thousands of studies and sketches were left in his studio upon his death (see R. Bacou, Millet dessins, Paris, 1975, pp. 9-18).