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Artist or Maker: Jean-François Millet (French, 1814-1875)

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Provenance: The artist's studio sale; Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 10-11 May 1875, lot 4, (bought by Weill).
William Rockefeller, New York before 1922 and thence by descent. Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, her sale; Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 5 December 1975, lot 64.
British Rail Pension Fund, London.
Anonymous sale [British Rail Pension Fund]; Sotheby's, 12 June 1996, lot 43.
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner.

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Literature: J. Cain and P. Leprieur, Millet, Paris, 1914, p. XIII (mistakenly described as from the Péreire collection).
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, European Paintings from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, New York, 1971, p. 267 (discussed under no. 141).

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Notes: Among the defining subjects for Jean-François Millet's Barbizon art were the shepherdesses who tended small flocks along the forest edges or in the sheltered corners of the Chailly Plain. From Millet's arrival in Barbizon in 1849 until the end of his life, he repeatedly found pictorial inspiration in these young women whose lives were so circumscribed by their wandering animals. In Shepherdess seated in the forest (Petite bergère assise), which falls early in Millet's fascination with this subject - roughly 1852-56 - he achieved one of his most successful attempts to blend closely observed details of the Forest of Fontainebleau and local costume into a timeless image of pensive loneliness.

Millet was always thoughtfully attuned to the lives of the women around him - his grandmother and older sister had been especially important to his youthful upbringing in Normandy, and by the time he took up the theme of Shepherdess seated in the forest, he was already raising three of what would ultimately be six daughters. During the mid-1850s, he devoted much of his production of paintings and drawings for private collectors and dealers to the household activities of his own family and the farming chores of neighbouring women. But where most of those scenes were focused on the specific tasks that defined the village housewives' lives, or on interaction between young mothers and their children, Millet's scenes of shepherdesses emphasised these other women's isolation form the larger village community. The late winter setting of this painting, in which the sheep press through heavy, wet snow in the shadowed forest to nibble new buds and young grass, gives a particular poignancy to the young girl, bundled in her heavy woollen cape, as she day-dreams wistfully about a love or life unknowable to the viewer.

Millet establised the composition for this work in a large drawing which differs from the painting principally in the addition of a large sheep on the right (Amsterdam, Dessins exposés chez Bernard Houthakker, 1952, no. 52; private collection, Paris); and a superb life study of the pensive figure (Musée du Louvre, Paris, fig.1). The artist almost certainly worked on the Shepherdess seated in the forest concurrently with another version of the same composition, which differs primarily in the colouring of her costume, and which is now in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The present work remained in Millet's possession throughout his life and was sold in his studio sale in 1875. Probably about twenty years later, the painting was acquired by William Rockefeller, the American financier and founder of Standard Oil. The picture descended in the Rockefeller family collections until its sale in 1975.

We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for providing this catalogue entry.

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.