Jean-François Millet

During the later half of the 1860s - in 1866, and 1867, and 1868 - Millet made three, month-long sojourns to the mineral spas at Vichy with his ailing wife, Catherine Lemaire. While the first two trips were extraordinarily productive, the artist's own poor health made the third notably less fruitful. Among Millet's approximately two hundred drawings of the countryside surrounding Vichy are a number of studies in graphite or pen and ink, accented with watercolor. Many of the sketches were executed outdoors in small notebooks on the artist's long walks and carriage rides. This drawing was executed on a leaf taken from a book; the verso contains a faint offset impression of a printed page. Millet added color notations in graphite to remind him of the tones of the landscape. Later, he would add washes to the sheet in his hotel room, or use these informal sketches as the basis for more finished watercolors both while in Vichy and once he returned home to Barbizon.