"La Grande Bergere"

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(1862)

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"La Grande Bergere" (Shepherdess Knitting), 1862, etching printed in brown on cream wove paper, with original deckle edges on right and bottom, 317x276mm; 12 1/2" x 9 3/8", wide margins.  Printed in 1862 by Cadart.  A superb, richly inked impression [Delteil 18; Melot 18].

Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), was born a peasant but received an impressive formal education and was allow 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. He 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 compared 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 in 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 in a 'Craig Ponzio Collection' Larson-Juhl 23 3/8" x 26 5/8" walnut burl frame with a raised black lip. The wood fillet matches the frame.  The outer hand covered camel linen and Titian gold  inner linen mats are acid and lignin free and are protected with Acrylite-AR OP3 (UV) by CYRO ........ SOLD