Lot Essay
Jean-François Millet drew Path through the Chestnut Trees, Cusset during the late 1860s, basing the pastel very closely on a drawing he had created in the Vichy region of France on a summer visit in 1866. Path through the Chestnut Trees, Cusset is one of the first of some twenty pastels that would result from three trips that the usually reluctant traveler made to south-central France so that his ailing wife might benefit from the mineral water spas in Vichy.
Many of the artists who were Millet's closest friends -- Theodore Rousseau, Jules Dupri, Corot, and Troyon -- traveled widely throughout France, recording the regional beauties and local landmarks of the vast nation. Millet, however, seldom strayed from his Barbizon home, crafting his scenes of rural life from observations in the fields and forest immediately adjacent to the village or from cherished memories of his Norman homeland. Only in 1866, as his wife's health faltered, did he allow himself to be lured away from his familiar studio for a month-long visit to the massif central, after an admiring patron offered to make all arrangements for Catherine to take treatments at the highly regarded spas of Vichy. Lodging initially in Cusset, a village north of Vichy, and later in a more rugged mountain locale in the Puy-de-Dôme region, Millet found himself immersed in a landscape that was simultaneously familiar and quite new. Many of the farming techniques and structures reminded him of Normandy in an earlier time; but precipitous drop-offs shaped his views of earth and sky quite differently than the endless Chailly plain, while the foliage and tinted soils of the heavily quarried uplands required a wholly new palette of colors.
While Madame Millet followed the spa regimen, Millet trekked across the countryside, carrying pocket notebooks in which he recorded his impressions. Over three successive visits in 1866, 1867, and 1868, Millet accumulated nearly two hundred pages of quick sketches that might be little more than simple intersecting lines following a mountain slope and dozens of highly finished studies so elaborately worked up in watercolor that they can stand alone as finished compositions. From the beginning Millet saw his sketching as a preliminary effort to support paintings and pastels that he would develop once back in Barbizon; but the experience profoundly shaped his entire art for the rest of his life and turned him into one of the most brilliant landscape draughtsmen of a century defined by landscape art.
Path through the Chestnut Trees, Cusset is probably the first finished pastel to have grown out of Millet's Vichy stays. It relies on an unusually fully articulated drawing (Chestnut Trees near Cusset, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) that suggests Millet knew from his first glimpse of the site how he wished to present the experience in a finished composition. In addition to setting out the main lines of the hillside, the sweep of chestnut trees and the well-eroded quarry wall, Millet covered the drawing with more than a dozen notes describing colors, the distinctive clods left by a hoe on the hillside, and the tufts of weedy grasses that mark the foreground -- and identifying the site as près Cusset. Millet carefully respected the initial sketch, adding only a shepherdess in typical regional dress (she wears the distinctive conical straw hat of the Auvergne) and a small troupe of sheep and a cow.
Millet had recently had agreed to an unusual commission posed by Emile Gavet, a Paris architect and land developer who had earlier owned the artist's Angelus (Paris, Musée d'Orsay) and now wished to build an
Many of the artists who were Millet's closest friends -- Theodore Rousseau, Jules Dupri, Corot, and Troyon -- traveled widely throughout France, recording the regional beauties and local landmarks of the vast nation. Millet, however, seldom strayed from his Barbizon home, crafting his scenes of rural life from observations in the fields and forest immediately adjacent to the village or from cherished memories of his Norman homeland. Only in 1866, as his wife's health faltered, did he allow himself to be lured away from his familiar studio for a month-long visit to the massif central, after an admiring patron offered to make all arrangements for Catherine to take treatments at the highly regarded spas of Vichy. Lodging initially in Cusset, a village north of Vichy, and later in a more rugged mountain locale in the Puy-de-Dôme region, Millet found himself immersed in a landscape that was simultaneously familiar and quite new. Many of the farming techniques and structures reminded him of Normandy in an earlier time; but precipitous drop-offs shaped his views of earth and sky quite differently than the endless Chailly plain, while the foliage and tinted soils of the heavily quarried uplands required a wholly new palette of colors.
While Madame Millet followed the spa regimen, Millet trekked across the countryside, carrying pocket notebooks in which he recorded his impressions. Over three successive visits in 1866, 1867, and 1868, Millet accumulated nearly two hundred pages of quick sketches that might be little more than simple intersecting lines following a mountain slope and dozens of highly finished studies so elaborately worked up in watercolor that they can stand alone as finished compositions. From the beginning Millet saw his sketching as a preliminary effort to support paintings and pastels that he would develop once back in Barbizon; but the experience profoundly shaped his entire art for the rest of his life and turned him into one of the most brilliant landscape draughtsmen of a century defined by landscape art.
Path through the Chestnut Trees, Cusset is probably the first finished pastel to have grown out of Millet's Vichy stays. It relies on an unusually fully articulated drawing (Chestnut Trees near Cusset, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) that suggests Millet knew from his first glimpse of the site how he wished to present the experience in a finished composition. In addition to setting out the main lines of the hillside, the sweep of chestnut trees and the well-eroded quarry wall, Millet covered the drawing with more than a dozen notes describing colors, the distinctive clods left by a hoe on the hillside, and the tufts of weedy grasses that mark the foreground -- and identifying the site as près Cusset. Millet carefully respected the initial sketch, adding only a shepherdess in typical regional dress (she wears the distinctive conical straw hat of the Auvergne) and a small troupe of sheep and a cow.
Millet had recently had agreed to an unusual commission posed by Emile Gavet, a Paris architect and land developer who had earlier owned the artist's Angelus (Paris, Musée d'Orsay) and now wished to build an