Jean-François Millet

Peasants at work were a mainstay of Millet's oeuvre, and harvesting potatoes was the subject of several works, including a painting sent to the Universal Exhibition of 1867. The present sheet may have belonged to Millet's Barbizon colleague Théodore Rousseau and his friend and agent Alfred Sensier. Both supported the impoverished and dedicated Millet, whom Rousseau befriended when he arrived at Barbizon in 1849. Sensier, acting as dealer and adviser to Millet, urged the artist to make independent drawings. As Laughton noted, by the 1850s, Sensier had amassed a group of twenty of these drawings, almost entirely in black chalk depicting field and farm laborers. He collectively referred to them under the invented title L'Épopée des champs (The Epic of the Fields). Although this sheet could easily be included in such a series, it is not among the twenty drawings from that group listed in Sensier's sale (which includes another sheet with the same title but different provenance).
This drawing is related to a damaged but authentic small-scale painting on panel of the same subject in the Davis Art Center, Wellesley College. The painting, which closely corresponds in scale (230 x 360 mm) to the drawing and nearly replicates its composition, features a more detailed townscape at right with the pitchfork in the right foreground. As Robert Herbert deduced from Millet's correspondence, the Wellesley painting was acquired from the artist in January or February 1854 by “a retired pharmacist named Letrône,” providing a terminus ante quem for its execution. Based on this evidence and the style and facture of the panel, Herbert dates the painting to 1853.
A black chalk sketch in the Louvre (RF 23591) was a première pensée for the composition. The artist swiftly outlined the basic composition, focusing on the figures' poses; on the verso is an additional rapidly executed sketch of the couple that emphasizes the posture of the man hefting the sack. It was made over another sketch, perhaps of the same peasant woman. The elements of the composition were thus quickly established, though the figural group would later be reversed, and the pitchfork is upright in this initial design. Executed on a slightly larger scale, the Morgan sheet is a more careful and finished study on the same scale and orientation as the modest Wellesley painting. Millet reversed the composition in the present sheet from the initial sketch and altered the woman's pose to one more upright. The painting corresponds to these changes; however, the pitchfork is on the opposite side of the composition. While the pentimenti in the pitchfork handle points to a preparatory function, the drawing could have been made to replicate the painting.
An unused study of a child's head in black chalk, which was squared for transfer and then canceled, is on the verso of the present sheet.