Among the many lost or little-known works by Jean-François Millet that came to light during preparations for the several exhibitions celebrating the centenary of the artist's death in 1975, surely the most unexpected and intriguing was this powerful and imposing painting of a horse. Millet's reputation, of course, has always been intertwined with rural themes, but it is as a painter of peasants, not as a master of horses, that we have known him; and both the considerable size of The Horse and the monumental presence of the startled stallion himself make the picture a most unusual one for Millet.

Although the painting is unsigned its attribution to Millet is certain, for the painting is clearly recorded by Alfred Sensier, the artist's long-time friend and biographer, who almost certainly learned of its existence from the artist himself; and beneath and behind the horse, Millet has left a pictoral signature in the details of a laitière normande (Norman milkmaid) and a clutch of Norman farmhouses that closely recall the buildings of his native Gruchy.

Sensier tells us that the painting was created as a signboard, commissioned from the artist by a Cherbourg veterinarian in 1840 or 1841, and the confident, heavily impastoed paint handling throughout, and the palette dominated by earth-tones both accord with the few documented paintings by Millet that date from his return to his native Normandy after leaving the École des Beaux-Arts in 1840. Millet settled in Cherbourg, the provincial capital where he had first begun his art studies some five years earlier, with the hope of establishing himself as a portraitist. Shortly after his arrival, the city fathers (who had invested in his future with a small stipend when he set off to Paris) commissioned from their young protégé a posthumous portrait of the late mayor. But with no existing photograph, of course, and very little agreement among the esteemed gentlemen's friends as to what he had looked like in life, Millet faced an impossible task -- which he apparently made even more difficult for himself when, in the face of several nosy kibbitzers, he asked a local handyman to pose for the hands of the mayor. The city council debated publicly about the reliability of the likeness of Millet's portrait, and payment was not forthcoming. While still committed to portrait painting, primarily among a circle of personal freinds, Millet found himself accepting a number of commissions for a sign painting. That is not a disreputable endeavor for a young artist -- Géricault left behind an exceptional, massive panel depicting a blacksmith and horse (although there is no reason to believe Millet could have known this), and in later years so popularly successful an artist as Gérôme had no hesitations about painting an emblem for a Parisian department store. But the haute monde of Cherbourg apparently did not relish having their portraits painted by the author of advertising pictures for a mid-wife and a sail maker, (in addition to the veterinarian who purchased The Horse) and soon afterwards the discouraged artist returned to Paris. That his departure was Cherbourg's loss is evident from the precocity of The Horse, as well as the extraordinary pair of portraits (now in Cherbourg's municipal museum) of his new wife and brother-in-law painted about the same time which make perfectly clear that Millet was one of the most gifted portraitists working anywhere in France during the early 1840s.

The size of The Horse and the strong foreshortening which suggests an intended setting well above the viewer both support the idea that the painting was commissioned as an advertising image. But the quality of the execution as well as the attention to the pictoral details and to expressive color suggest strongly that Millet's ambitions for the picture were well beyond the standards of signage. Indeed, the painting's condition gives every indication that from the beginning The Horse was appreciated and cared for as a straight forward work of art rather than as a billboard.

As far as we know of Millet's early career, he had never painted a horse before this painting (and he seldom gave such prominence to animals again in his work); and it is likely that he found inspiration in an engraving or a reproduction. Certainly the static energy of the horse and the nervousness of its startled pause suggest the romantic fascination with spirited horses that was current in Paris during Millet's student days; and both the light-struck stormy sky and the assertive paint handling recall the example of Géricault, the great French master of horse painting, as well as his artistic heir, Delacroix.

If the depiction of the horse itself marks Millet's debt to the Romanticism of his contemporaries in 1840-41, however, the landscape and the milkmaid are most assuredly Millet's own touches and a very important prefiguration of paintings yet to come from the young artist. Among those would be nearly a dozen paintings and drawings of laitières normands, in which the milkmaid retains the same basic pose as in The Horse while gradually shedding her eighteenth-century attributes for the true Realism of Millet's mature career; and any number of landscapes of Normandy and the Allier, in which stone farmhouses nestle into a fold of land, just as Millet always remembered them from his youth in Gruchy.

We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.