Jean-François Millet

Émile Gavet, Paris, by whom commissioned from the artist circa 1867-68,

his sale and others, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 11-12 June 1875, lot 92;

Private Collection;

sale, New York, Sotheby's, 23 May 1996, lot 30,

where acquired by the present owner

Centered on the double water wheels and mill race of an old grinding mill, Le Moulin à eau is one of Millet’s most extraordinary works in the pastel medium. Pastel chalks allowed Millet to draw directly in color; and in Le Moulin à eau he used the medium to great effect, accenting the rippling water with bold, raveling threads of turquoise or capturing the bubbles breaking at the foot of the wheel with a thick, sparkling build-up of whites and blue-grays. Around the mill race, he arrayed a range of plants and mossy stones that offered him great scope for a variety of colored touches and textures. Almost as an afterthought, he tucked a flock of geese along the dropping hillside at left, using their bright white plumage to enliven the mist-shrouded distance and briefly to distract the viewer from the lively foreground.

During the 1860s, Millet was the most important French artist working in pastels. He had experimented briefly with colored chalks during the 1840s, when his interest in the revival of eighteenth-century subject matter had led him naturally to the medium so closely associated with Rococo tastes; but it was only when his growing interest in landscape came together with his experiments with drawing techniques that he seriously pursued pastel as a medium. The distinctive range of rich greens, blues, and grays, and the assured, sometimes eccentric, crayon and pastel marks all relate this large sheet to Millet’s watercolors and pastels of 1867-68, realized in the Vichy area of south-central France.

In 1865, Emile Gavet, a collector who had already acquired a number of Millet drawings and pastels from Parisian dealers, gave the artist an open-ended commission for all the pastels he cared to produce. For much of the next four years, Millet concentrated on pastels and large black crayon drawings for Gavet, many of which explored scenes of Vichy and the Auvergne. Millet spent a few weeks each summer from 1866 through 1868 visiting the mineral water spas around Vichy, where his wife took a regime of baths and treatments to cure her illness. The artist created at least sixteen pastels identifiable with Vichy and Auvergne sites for Gavet and it is likely that he was the original owner of Le Moulin a eau. The sale of Gavet’s collection in 1875 describes three pastels that feature water mills. Two of Gavet’s mill pastels can be convincingly identified with a pastel now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art and with a pastel believed lost in Japan during the Second World War; Gavet’s third mill scene, however, has been a puzzle, as the listed dimensions of 33 by 50 centimeters do not fit any known pastel of a Vichy mill. If the height of 33 centimeters listed in the Gavet catalogue is a misprint for 43 centimeters, then the present work may very well be the missing Gavet pastel.

We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy who authenticated this work for sale ahead of its market debut in 1996 and assisted with the preparation of its cataloguing.