Jean-François MIllet

Antoine Marmontel (before 1887 and sold: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, March 28-29, 1898, lot 156) 
Alfred Beurdeley (and sold: his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, June 2-4, 1920, lot 281)
Croal Thomson, Barbizon House, London (1924)
H.E. Ten Cate, Almelo, Holland (and sold: Sotheby's, London, December 3, 1958, lot 76)
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, February 24, 1987, lot 29
Acquired at the above sale by A. Alfred Taubman

Paris, École des Beaux-Arts, J.F. Millet, 1887, no. 71
Almelo, Holland, Van Daumier tot Picasso:  Twents particulier bezit, 1956, no. 94, illustrated 
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 1968 (on loan)

Croal Thompson, Barbizon House Record, London, 1924, no. 24, illustrated, as Millet's Garden at Barbizon
Dr. D. Hannema, Catalogue of the H.E. Ten Cate Collection, Rotterdam, 1955, vol. I, p. 97, no. 164; vol. II, pl. 133, illustrated
Bruce Laughton, The Drawings of Daumier and Millet, New Haven, 1991, p. 130, 132, no. 8.27, illustrated

Please contact the 19th Century European Paintings Department at (212) 606-7140 for the condition report for this lot.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Jean-François Millet painted Femme étendant son linge  in 1856-58, as he increasingly turned his attention from the larger scale, more formal oil paintings that had dominated his art for a decade toward smaller, often much more personal, works on paper. Combining recollections of his youth in rural Normandy with the immediate experiences of his own family life in the village of Barbizon, Femme étendant son linge is one of the most appealing and complex works in what was for Millet the still-unfamiliar realm of colored drawings.  As he turned one of his smaller black chalk compositions into the airy, sunlit garden of Femme étendant son linge, Millet subtly shifted the direction of his art, whether on paper or on canvas, for the next twenty years.

Femme étendant son linge  is set in a small back garden that might be Millet’s own, or that of his Barbizon neighbor, the American painter William Perkins Babcock—the bee skips, aged fruit trees, and weathered paling which separated an intensively worked vegetable patch from a more open orchard area  were common to most village properties.  But the distinctive, winged white bonnet of the housewife laying out her laundry along the wooden fence connects this Barbizon scene to Millet’s recent return to his Norman homeland  in 1854 and to the artist’s fond recollections of both his mother (whose death had prompted that overdue visit) and his cherished older sister,  Emélie, who had posed  for him for a crayon noir drawing La Blanchisseuse  (sold in these rooms, May 7, 1998, lot 153, fig. 1). With its single, central figure laying laundry along a typical Norman hedge, that image belonged firmly to Millet’s exploration of the working lives of peasants and villagers that characterized his creations of the 1840s and early 1850s. When he took the figure of Emélie, turned her away from the viewer and incorporated it into a much more complex landscape, Millet was committing his art to a closer study of the physical terrain his subjects inhabited, with all the problems of capturing light, texture and color that such an expansion of his interests implied.  As beautiful as the landscapes of his earlier paintings and drawings may have been, they had  been backgrounds,  schematic  and  generalized.  With his work in watercolor in the late 1850s (the introduction of the new medium in Millet’s art was itself another hallmark of the 1854 Normandy visit),  Millet began to take on the challenges of landscape painting that were so much in the air in the 1850s, particularly in his adopted Barbizon homeland.

In joining the village housewife of Femme étendant son linge to the compelling pair of children in the foreground,  Millet may well have celebrated the recent return to Normandy on a much more personal level.   By 1856, he was the father of five children, two of whom, his firstborn son François and new daughter, Emilie, are very likely the brother and sister so lovingly presented  beneath the apple tree.

Please note that in the print catalogue for this sale, this lot appears as number 216T.