Drawing, Female nude in a forest landscape, Jean-François Millet, French school, 1846-50

A female nude seated in a wooded grove, her face turned downward at her leg and hand

Bequeathed by Hans Velten

Bequeathed by Hans Velten, 1931

This drawing by the French artist Jean-François Millet, in pierre noire pencil, presents a sculptural reduring of a seated female nude in a forest grove. Its heavy contour lines, dramatic chiaroscuro and foreshortening are indicators of Millet’s work from the late 1840s.

The work’s expressivity and blue grey paper are similar to another of Millet’s pastoral nudes, Femme se baignant 1846-1850 (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Both the Louvre example and the present work illustrate a shift in the artist’s style from the typical academic nude to one possessing looseness and unique texture.

The partial drawing on the reverse is an unfinished portrait of a woman. The similarities it holds to Millet’s portrait drawings of the late 1840s, like that of his second wife, Catherine Lemaire, 1848-49 (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA) further implicate this portion of his career as the period of execution for both the nude and partial portrait.

Millet sought inspiration from Poussin and Michelangelo for many of his nudes and was also deeply moved by the arcadian figures of Narcisse Diaz, whose work he had seen at the Paris Salons and whom he met around 1847. Creating about twenty-five known oils and fifty drawings of nude figures during the 1840s, his style began to evolve from its Rococo characteristics, which formerly echoed the idyllic scenes of Boucher and Fragonard, into the naturalist style he became known for.

Millet moved from Paris to Barbizon in 1849 where he became a founding member of the Barbizon school of painting whose members also included Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles-François Daubigny. The group advocated a push toward Naturalism and utilized muted tonalities, looseness, and soft rendurings by celebrating the lives of rural peasants.

This drawing by Jean-François Millet, in pierre noire pencil, presents a sculptural reduring of a female nude amongst foliage. The arcadian subject matter combined with dark contour lines and atmospheric technique all point to a turning point in Millet’s ouevre that started to take place in the 1840s. His academic style began to merge with Naturalism, finally culminating after his move to Barbizon in 1849 where he became a founding member of the Barbizon School.

E.3083-1931