Jean-François Millet

Alexander Young III, Scotland, by 1907

James G. Shepherd (d. 1935), Pennsylvania

Howard Young Gallery, New York, by 1924

Bernard B. Jones, Virginia

Dr. and Mrs. Francis Fowler, Washington, D.C. (sale: Sotheby's, New York, 13 October 1978, lot 182)

Purchased from the above sale by the present owner's father

Ernest G. Halton, 'The Collection of Mr. Alexander Young, III: Some Barbizon Pictures', in The International Studio, January 1907, p. 198

New York, Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, probably no. 38

New York, The Engineers' Club, loaned by James G. Shepherd

Painted during the last years of the 1840s, The Wanderers, of a mother and child paused in their travels with no clear destination before them, is a reflection of the period of great social upheaval in France before and after the 1848 revolution.

As evinced by a label on the reverse, the painting has been known in the past under the title Hagar and Ishmael, in reference to the Old Testament story of the young concubine and her son and banished to the desert by Abraham after his aged wife finally bore him a son. This was a theme familiar to Millet, for at the same time that he was working on The Wanderers he was preparing a large composition of Hagar and Ishmael as a state commission, which was never completed and is now in the Musée Medsag in The Hague. The present work is, in many ways, the story of Hagar and Ishmael transposed into a quasi-contemporary modern setting, the Biblical figures substituted for a young peasant mother and her child. The empty water jug most commonly associated with depictions of the Old Testament story to connote the desert setting has here been replaced by a staff and sack, symbols of itinerant wanderers. The main reference in this painting is almost certainly to the countless young homeless men, women, and children that had become visible throughout France and particularly in Paris during the 1840s. Peasants were being displaced from their land and forced to eke out a new existence in the industrializing cities that were ill-prepared to receive them.

Images of the social upheaval in France at this time became central to many artists’ work. Millet’s painting, however, lacks the harshness of comparable images by Honoré Daumier, for instance. Here the young mother comforts her child, but she herself does not appear in distress. On the contrary, her expression is one of stoic calm and graceful beauty, typical of Millet’s depictions of peasants, whom he elevates to a higher, untouchable level. The ambiguities of The Wanderers between the Biblical and the modern are an indication of shifting art patronage. This small-scale painting was no doubt destined for one of the emerging dealers who were capitalizing on a market for modern paintings among the newly emerging Parisian bourgeoisie who were the main benefactors of the changes reshaping the French nation. As Millet scholar Alexandra Murphy points out, the differences that distinguish The Wanderers from the more traditional Hagar and Ishmael imagery are a reminder of the two very different emerging art worlds, those of the public Salon exhibitions and the private collector market, in which artists including Millet had to compete. Indeed, the present work belonged to British collector Alexander young, who at the turn of the twentieth century amassed sizeable collections of Barbizon and Hague School paintings.