Gouache and pastel on paper. Featuring two figures holding hay in landscape scene. Signed and attr. Jean-Francois Millet (French, 1814-1875) on the lower right corner. Inscribed with gallery number, verso. 27.5 x 19.5 cm (10.8 x 7.7 in). Jean-François Millet was a celebrated French painter and member of what became known as the Barbizon School. In his dusky painting The Gleaners (1857), Millet meditated on the profound relationship he saw between peasants and the landscapes they farmed. “It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power,†he once said. Born on October 4, 1814 in Gruchy, France, Millet grew up in a deeply religious farming family, before being sent to Cherbourg to study under a local portrait painter. Traveling to Paris in 1837, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts where he became a pupil of the well-known history painter Paul Delaroche. Over the next decade, Millet moved between Cherbourg and Paris without finding success in either. In 1849, he fled Paris to the small village of Barbizon due to an outbreak of cholera. Here he joined the painters Théodore Rousseau and Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña, but unlike his peers who depicted the rocky terrain around the forest of Fontainebleau, Millet chose the small farms and their occupants as motifs. The paintings he produced during the years that followed earned him the Legion of Honor in 1865. The artist died on January 20, 1875 in Barbizon, France. Today, Millet’s works are held in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among others. PROVENANCE: Private American collection

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By [Artist Name] : In our opinion, the work is by the artist.

Attributed to [Artist Name] : In our opinion, the work may be ascribed to the artist on the basis of style, but there may be some question as to actual authorship.

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After [Artist Name] : In our opinion, the work was executed by an unknown hand, but is a deliberate copy of a known work by the artist.

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American, 19th century : In our opinion, this work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).

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Apocryphal : Of doubtful authenticity.