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Lot Essay
Jean François Millet painted La Méridienne, a scene of hay-makers taking a brief rest from their work, around 1849 - either just before or soon after he moved from Paris to Barbizon with his young family. The supple, long brushstrokes with which he quickly shaped his figures and the pervasive golden tint of the dusty hayfield are stylistic traits that connect La Méridienne to the crucial moments around the revolution of 1848 when Millet established himself as a leader of the new realist movement in French painting.
Simple scenes of rural workers pausing in their labours, such as La Méridienne or the contemporary Seated Shepherdess (Cardiff, National Gallery of Wales, (fig 1.)) played a critical role in Millet's transition from the light, rather rococo paintings of his maniere fleurie to the realistic, closely observed compositions of French peasants deeply engaged in demanding tasks that are the hallmark of his achievement. While living in Paris at the end of the 1840s, Millet spent many hours watching harvesters or women carrying water in the villages on the outskirts of the city, seeking the gestures and telling details that might be combined into the powerful paintings to which he aspired. There was little precedent in western art for serious images of working peasants before Millet (Brueghel being the most important exception) and within the French tradition especially, any artist taking up these themes had to struggle against the trivializing example of eighteenth-century art and literature that often used be-ribboned, satin-slippered sheperdesses or trysting lovers behind a haystack as symbols of human frailty and foolishness. Boucher's influence was still strongly felt in mid-nineteenth-century magazine illustration and even salon paintings. In this depiction of a young woman dozing with her head on her hand, while a young man lies at her feet, trying to engage her in conversation, Millet came much closer to the realities of rural life as he himself had experienced them growing up in a small Norman farming community. Painted perhaps as a preparation for the larger Le repos de faneur (Paris, Musée d'Orsay) which was acquired by the short-lived republican administration in 1849, La Méridienne is the first example of a theme to which Millet returned frequently; a later version of the subject shows a man and woman lying exhausted and indifferent alongside each other beneath a haystack (Noonday Rest, known in both an 1858 drawing that was copied by Van Gogh and a pastel, 1866, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).
La Méridienne was one of an unusually large number of paintings and drawings by Millet that were collected in Boston during the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. The painting is believed to have been acquired directly from Millet, shortly after its creation, by a young American painter, William Morris Hunt, who studied in Paris in the studio of Thomas Couture and then moved to Barbizon in admiration of Millet about 1851. Back in Boston in the later 1850s and 1860s, Hunt was a principal force in introducing contemporary French painting to Boston collectors and art students.
The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by Alexandra R. Murphy and we are grateful for her assistance in preparing this catalogue note.
Simple scenes of rural workers pausing in their labours, such as La Méridienne or the contemporary Seated Shepherdess (Cardiff, National Gallery of Wales, (fig 1.)) played a critical role in Millet's transition from the light, rather rococo paintings of his maniere fleurie to the realistic, closely observed compositions of French peasants deeply engaged in demanding tasks that are the hallmark of his achievement. While living in Paris at the end of the 1840s, Millet spent many hours watching harvesters or women carrying water in the villages on the outskirts of the city, seeking the gestures and telling details that might be combined into the powerful paintings to which he aspired. There was little precedent in western art for serious images of working peasants before Millet (Brueghel being the most important exception) and within the French tradition especially, any artist taking up these themes had to struggle against the trivializing example of eighteenth-century art and literature that often used be-ribboned, satin-slippered sheperdesses or trysting lovers behind a haystack as symbols of human frailty and foolishness. Boucher's influence was still strongly felt in mid-nineteenth-century magazine illustration and even salon paintings. In this depiction of a young woman dozing with her head on her hand, while a young man lies at her feet, trying to engage her in conversation, Millet came much closer to the realities of rural life as he himself had experienced them growing up in a small Norman farming community. Painted perhaps as a preparation for the larger Le repos de faneur (Paris, Musée d'Orsay) which was acquired by the short-lived republican administration in 1849, La Méridienne is the first example of a theme to which Millet returned frequently; a later version of the subject shows a man and woman lying exhausted and indifferent alongside each other beneath a haystack (Noonday Rest, known in both an 1858 drawing that was copied by Van Gogh and a pastel, 1866, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).
La Méridienne was one of an unusually large number of paintings and drawings by Millet that were collected in Boston during the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. The painting is believed to have been acquired directly from Millet, shortly after its creation, by a young American painter, William Morris Hunt, who studied in Paris in the studio of Thomas Couture and then moved to Barbizon in admiration of Millet about 1851. Back in Boston in the later 1850s and 1860s, Hunt was a principal force in introducing contemporary French painting to Boston collectors and art students.
The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by Alexandra R. Murphy and we are grateful for her assistance in preparing this catalogue note.