Lot Essay
Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Millet often favored the more intimate media of drawing for scenes taken from the daily life of his own household or the private moments of the peasant families who were his neighbors in Barbizon. First Steps is the first of Millet's four finished drawings of the theme of a child reaching towards his father as he starts to toddle across an open farmyard, and it is the only version executed in watercolor.
Drawings fully colored with watercolors are very rare in Millet's oeuvre and consequently difficult to date. However, the drawing style and the emphasis on relatively large-scale figures centred in a simplified setting distinguish the First Steps from the three compositions executed in crayon and pastel--Lauren Rogers Library, Laurel, Mississippi; Cleveland Museum of Art; and private collection Germany--which are known from correspondence to date to 1858-59. The watercolor drawing of First Steps was probably created in 1853-54, when Millet was also working on a more formal family composition in oils, Man Grafting a Tree (Munich, Neue Pinakothek).
By the mid-1850s, Millet was already the father of four children, and he may well have found inspiration for the general subject of First Steps in his own experience. However, the pose of the mother supporting her young child is strinkingly similar to a drawing in the Louvre's collection, Rembrandt's The Pancake Woman. Millet was strongly moved by Rÿmbrandt's work and a number of the French painter's family scenes of the 1850's bear much-remarked parallels to the drawings and etchings of the seventeenth-century master.
More than a dozen studies and sketches are related to the group of First Steps drawings. One preliminary sketch that was direcly incorporated in the present drawing is the study of a woman supporting a child in the Cabanet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, GM10350/R.F. 5686.
In 1890, Van Gogh copied a later version of First Steps (from a reproduction) in a painting now belonging to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
Drawings fully colored with watercolors are very rare in Millet's oeuvre and consequently difficult to date. However, the drawing style and the emphasis on relatively large-scale figures centred in a simplified setting distinguish the First Steps from the three compositions executed in crayon and pastel--Lauren Rogers Library, Laurel, Mississippi; Cleveland Museum of Art; and private collection Germany--which are known from correspondence to date to 1858-59. The watercolor drawing of First Steps was probably created in 1853-54, when Millet was also working on a more formal family composition in oils, Man Grafting a Tree (Munich, Neue Pinakothek).
By the mid-1850s, Millet was already the father of four children, and he may well have found inspiration for the general subject of First Steps in his own experience. However, the pose of the mother supporting her young child is strinkingly similar to a drawing in the Louvre's collection, Rembrandt's The Pancake Woman. Millet was strongly moved by Rÿmbrandt's work and a number of the French painter's family scenes of the 1850's bear much-remarked parallels to the drawings and etchings of the seventeenth-century master.
More than a dozen studies and sketches are related to the group of First Steps drawings. One preliminary sketch that was direcly incorporated in the present drawing is the study of a woman supporting a child in the Cabanet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, GM10350/R.F. 5686.
In 1890, Van Gogh copied a later version of First Steps (from a reproduction) in a painting now belonging to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.