"La Cardeuse"

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(1855-56)

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"La Cardeuse" (1855-56), etching printed in sepia on tissue thin Japan paper, 256x177mm, 10 1/4" x 7", full margins. A superb and luminous impression with warm plate tones [Delteil 15; Melot 15].

Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), was born a peasant but received an impressive formal education and was allowed to study in Cherbourg (1833-36) under Mouchel and Langlois, and later, Paul Delaroche. In 1868, Millet won the Legion of Honor. He was a leading exponent of the Barbizon school of art. The Barbizon school, named for a hamlet in the forest of Fontainebleau, is most closely associated with the revival of etching and focused on the conflict between the Industrial Revolution and the way of life it was replacing. Millet was predominantly an artist of peasant subjects, conceived in an austerely monumental style.  He rarely worked in the pure landscape genre of the other Barbizon artists. Of the Barbizon artists, Millet is stylistically best compare to Corot.

In Millet's works, rural subjects attained a forceful political meaning since the woodlands around Paris were an area of political turmoil where the peasant population was being driven out and forced to seek work in the quarries and urban factories. His prints focused on the mundane activities of the rural forests and the series of tasks endlessly repeated.  His vision of pastoral life was sullen ,deterministic, and read by some contemporaries as politically dangerous.  Millet's emphasis on the dreary, unchanging severity of peasant life was quite contemporary in that it showed a displaced proletariat struggling to survive. In part, the power of his figure groups and peasants was due to his insistence on the classical virtues of relief and simplicity.  The monumental character of his peasant works were to have a profound effect upon Van Gogh and Seurat.

This Millet is in a classic gold highlighted swan back 25 3/16" x 28 7/16" frame with a rich umber wash. The distressed finished wood fillet is mottled gold with a brushed umber wash.  The outer Titian gold linen and inner chestnut brown virgin fiber mats are acid and lignin free and protected with Acrylite-AR OP3 (UV) by CYRO ............. SOLD