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Description: signed "J. F. Millet" lower right- -crayon on textured paper laid down on paper on board. 12 x 8 1/2 in. (30.5 x 21.5 cm.) PROVENANCE Alfred Sensier; sale, Paris, Hotel Drouot, December 10-12, 1877, no. 252, bought by Jules Roederer, Le Havre With Colnaghi, London (about 1978) British Rail Pension Fund EXHIBITED Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University and Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Works from a British Collection," 1986, no. 30 LITERATURE Anon., "Chronique de l'Hotel Drouot," "L'Art," 1877, tome IV, p. 190, repro. 189; 1878, tome I, p. 48 D. Mosby, "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Works from a British Collection" (exhibition catalogue, Picker Art Gallery, Hamilton, New York, 1986), pp. 88-89 "Shepherdess Knitting While Tending her Flock" dates from about 1854 and is the earliest known version of a composition that enjoyed uncommon success among Millet's private patrons. Between the mid-1850s and his death in 1875, Millet created nearly a dozen paintings, drawings and pastels featuring a similarly posed shepherdess resting against a rock, a tree or an embankment in slightly differing landscape settings. In 1864, an oil painting that presented essentially the same knitting shepherdess, but standing freely on the open plain, won Millet his first great popular success at the Salon exhibition. When Millet arrived in Barbizon in 1849, the three or four shepherdesses who guarded small flocks in the woods and fields nearby were a relatively new phenomenon for him- -in his native Normandy, both sheep and cows had grazed unattended in enclosed pastures. Although he was quite disdainful of the traditional imagery which frequently depicted shepherdesses as flirtatious, impossibly-corseted child-women traipsing barefoot through a garden-like terrain, Millet was slow to develop an alternative, more modern vision. A number of small paintings and drawings created over several years suggest that he only gradually recognized how strongly isolation and boredom limited the shepherdess's life. In "Shepherdess Knitting..." he shaped a very simple composition that contrasted the solid, sculptural figure of his shepherdess with a vast, spreading landscape on which she turns her back. As he began to focus on a young woman deeply engrossed in the heavy stocking she is knitting, Millet created a powerful symbol of quiet simplicity and diligent hard work that could be hailed as an icon of rural peacefulness by collectors and critics who feared or misunderstood many of Millet's other Barbizon figures. "Shepherdess Knitting While Tending her Flock" belonged to Alfred Sensier, a Parisian bureaucrat who met Millet in 1847 and in nearly twenty-five years of friendship amassed a particularly astute collection of the artist's drawings and smaller paintings. Whether Sensier himself commissioned the work from Millet or acquired it later from another owner is uknown. "Shepherdess" was included among a group of Millet drawings illustrating an article on the sale of Sensier's collection after his death in 1877, one of the first publications to suggest that Millet's drawings might prove a greater source of lasting fame than his better known paintings. Shortly thereafter, "Shepherdess Knitting..." disappeared from public view until its rediscovery fifteen years ago. A rather ironic appreciation of the appeal and popularity of this drawing can be deduced from the existence of three distinct forgeries, all apparently based based on the nineteenth-century reproduction. The drawing is still in its original mount and the backing board bears the stamp of Eugene Detrimont, the framer who prepared most of Millet's work throughout his career. We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.