Pastures in Normandy

Pastures in Normandy was drawn by Jean-François Millet during a return visit to his native Gruchy, outside Cherbourg, probably in 1854 when he spent the summer re-familiarizing himself with the countryside of his youth.

Uncommonly large among Millet's watercolors, Pastures in Normandy represents a series of small fields divided by hedgerows and recalls the hillsides southeast of coastal Gruchy. Although Millet's use of watercolor for landscape drawing is generally associated with his visits to the Vichy region during 1866-68 (the present drawing has traditionally been titled Landscape near Vichy), he began combining watercolor washes and brown ink for landscape studies during an earlier stay in Normandy. Such drawings allowed Millet to rapidly record the characteristic hues and textures of sites that he hoped to utilize at a later date back in Barbizon as settings for scenes of peasant life. The large page size, a somewhat bluer range of foliage colors, and the colored sky distinguish this watercolor from Millet's 1860s Vichy drawings.

Pastures in Normandy is stamped at lower left with the J.F. Millet cachet used to authenticate the more important works on paper found in the estate of Millet's widow at her death in 1894. The present landscape very probably corresponds to lot 13 in the widow's sale, a watercolor entitled Prie en Normandie, despite a difference in dimensions. That sale catalogue apparently listed the design dimensions rather than the slightly larger dimensions of the overall sheet.

We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for preparing this catalogue entry.