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Lot Essay
Jean-François Millet painted La fin de la journée; effet du soir in 1865-67, a final realization of a figure whose striking pose had captured the artist's interest as much as fifteen years earlier. Also known as L'Homme à la veste, for the unusual gesture of a solitary worker struggling into his coat sleeve at the end of his day's labors, the painting belongs to a group of memorable images with which Millet captured the hardships as well as the quiet dignity of life on the vast agricultural plain outside his Barbizon village. As the two-part title indicates, La fin de la journée; effet du soir is equally a celebration of the striking twilight effects that Millet so admired as he closed his own day by wandering the fields and forests beyond his small village studio.
Millet first recorded a tired worker with his arm entangled in his sleeve in a drawing now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that dates from the artist's first year or two of acquainting himself with the new home he established in a tiny rural community thirty miles outside of Paris. In that 1852 version of The End of the Day, a sturdy workman and his wife are set against a rising hillside, the woman tying up sacks of potatoes while her husband dons his jacket, and a heavily cloaked shepherd leads his flock into a sheltering copse in the distance. The drawing is a realistic accumulation of details from a family potato harvest, and only a bit of heavier crayon work in the figure of the workman suggests Millet's particular interest in the male character. Several years later, however, in preparation of four drawings to illustrate the Hours of the Day for a popular magazine, Millet returned to the man donning his jacket, enlarging him and eliminating the woman, donkey and potato sacks to focus attention cleanly on the laborer who stands alone, with his feet braced against the ground, clumsily pulling a floppy sleeve over his extended arm (see A. Lavielle's wood engraving of Millet's Le Soir, 1858-60, fig. 1). In the process of simplifying the composition and emphasizing the off-balance posture of his farmer, Millet created a concentrated image of exhaustion. When he moved on to work the figure into a painting, La fin de la journée; effet du soir, Millet focused even more forcefully on his laborer, giving him a powerful monumentality by raising the figure well above the horizon and dramatically expanding the agricultural plain by pushing an abandoned plow and the plowman and his horses, on either side of the laborer, much deeper into the distance. Importantly, Millet also altered the workman's task, exchanging the spading fork and basket of harvested potatoes in the earlier composition for a simple, heavy hoe. By changing his workman from a farmer gathering a family meal, poor as it might have been, to a laborer hacking at the hard-beaten, weed-knotted soil with a short-handled hoe, Millet made La fin de la journée; effet du soir a symbolic depiction of mankind standing against nature in an endless effort to wrest productivity from unpromising earth. The small plot of land opened up at his feet lies in contrast to the vast field beyond, cultivated by a farmer able to afford draft animals and a plow for the same task.
Yet, while La fin de la journée; effet du soir forthrightly recognizes the tiring task of cultivating the soil, the laborer is not beaten or bent into despair as in the artist's earlier Man with a Hoe (Los Angeles, Getty Museum); and the simplified, twilight landscape in which he is framed offers a subtle celebration of the magnificence inherent in even the most elemental terrain. Encroaching night is rapidly draining color from the spreading field, and details of the workman's face and clothing are only barely distinguishable from the earth around him. Still, the laborer stands against a softly, complexly colored horizon of the slightest pinks and oranges fading into the blue-grey dome; and echoing touches of the rapidly fading sky are worked throughout the broken soil and weedy verge. The vast Plain of Chailly was endlessly compelling to Millet and he was drawn there nearly every night as dimming light made work in his studio impossible. He spoke to trusted friends of how deeply he was moved by the sight of individual figures isolated against the distance, turned to giants by the angled light of sunset. The laborer of La fin de la journée; effet du soir stands tall above his pitiful plot at the same time that he is absorbed into it, made of the same stuff as the soil he tills.
Millet's figure of a laborer pulling on his jacket is one of the dozen Millet images that were powerfully influential for Vincent van Gogh, who admired Millet's ability to craft simple, convincing figures and who found in Millet's scenes of the laboring poor a sympathy van Gogh considered lacking in most contemporary painting. After drawing a copy of the Lavielle engraving after Millet's early version of Le Soir in 1880, van Gogh returned to the subject in 1889 to paint his own interpretation of La fin de la journée (fig.2, Menard Art Museum, Komaki, Japan).
La fin de la journée was acquired after Millet's death by Henri Rouart, a wealthy industrialist who was a friend of Degas, a supporter of the Impressionists and a skilled amateur painter in his own right. Over the last decades of the century, Rouart built the most sophisticated collection of Millet drawings, paintings and pastels in Europe. He was a generous lender, and his loan of La fin de la journée to the important, if belated, retrospective of Millet's work at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1887 and to the great celebration of a century of French art at the Exposition Universelle in 1900 contributed significantly to the fame of the painting, which was further spread by its inclusion in an elaborate collection of plates.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for providing this catalogue entry.
Millet first recorded a tired worker with his arm entangled in his sleeve in a drawing now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that dates from the artist's first year or two of acquainting himself with the new home he established in a tiny rural community thirty miles outside of Paris. In that 1852 version of The End of the Day, a sturdy workman and his wife are set against a rising hillside, the woman tying up sacks of potatoes while her husband dons his jacket, and a heavily cloaked shepherd leads his flock into a sheltering copse in the distance. The drawing is a realistic accumulation of details from a family potato harvest, and only a bit of heavier crayon work in the figure of the workman suggests Millet's particular interest in the male character. Several years later, however, in preparation of four drawings to illustrate the Hours of the Day for a popular magazine, Millet returned to the man donning his jacket, enlarging him and eliminating the woman, donkey and potato sacks to focus attention cleanly on the laborer who stands alone, with his feet braced against the ground, clumsily pulling a floppy sleeve over his extended arm (see A. Lavielle's wood engraving of Millet's Le Soir, 1858-60, fig. 1). In the process of simplifying the composition and emphasizing the off-balance posture of his farmer, Millet created a concentrated image of exhaustion. When he moved on to work the figure into a painting, La fin de la journée; effet du soir, Millet focused even more forcefully on his laborer, giving him a powerful monumentality by raising the figure well above the horizon and dramatically expanding the agricultural plain by pushing an abandoned plow and the plowman and his horses, on either side of the laborer, much deeper into the distance. Importantly, Millet also altered the workman's task, exchanging the spading fork and basket of harvested potatoes in the earlier composition for a simple, heavy hoe. By changing his workman from a farmer gathering a family meal, poor as it might have been, to a laborer hacking at the hard-beaten, weed-knotted soil with a short-handled hoe, Millet made La fin de la journée; effet du soir a symbolic depiction of mankind standing against nature in an endless effort to wrest productivity from unpromising earth. The small plot of land opened up at his feet lies in contrast to the vast field beyond, cultivated by a farmer able to afford draft animals and a plow for the same task.
Yet, while La fin de la journée; effet du soir forthrightly recognizes the tiring task of cultivating the soil, the laborer is not beaten or bent into despair as in the artist's earlier Man with a Hoe (Los Angeles, Getty Museum); and the simplified, twilight landscape in which he is framed offers a subtle celebration of the magnificence inherent in even the most elemental terrain. Encroaching night is rapidly draining color from the spreading field, and details of the workman's face and clothing are only barely distinguishable from the earth around him. Still, the laborer stands against a softly, complexly colored horizon of the slightest pinks and oranges fading into the blue-grey dome; and echoing touches of the rapidly fading sky are worked throughout the broken soil and weedy verge. The vast Plain of Chailly was endlessly compelling to Millet and he was drawn there nearly every night as dimming light made work in his studio impossible. He spoke to trusted friends of how deeply he was moved by the sight of individual figures isolated against the distance, turned to giants by the angled light of sunset. The laborer of La fin de la journée; effet du soir stands tall above his pitiful plot at the same time that he is absorbed into it, made of the same stuff as the soil he tills.
Millet's figure of a laborer pulling on his jacket is one of the dozen Millet images that were powerfully influential for Vincent van Gogh, who admired Millet's ability to craft simple, convincing figures and who found in Millet's scenes of the laboring poor a sympathy van Gogh considered lacking in most contemporary painting. After drawing a copy of the Lavielle engraving after Millet's early version of Le Soir in 1880, van Gogh returned to the subject in 1889 to paint his own interpretation of La fin de la journée (fig.2, Menard Art Museum, Komaki, Japan).
La fin de la journée was acquired after Millet's death by Henri Rouart, a wealthy industrialist who was a friend of Degas, a supporter of the Impressionists and a skilled amateur painter in his own right. Over the last decades of the century, Rouart built the most sophisticated collection of Millet drawings, paintings and pastels in Europe. He was a generous lender, and his loan of La fin de la journée to the important, if belated, retrospective of Millet's work at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1887 and to the great celebration of a century of French art at the Exposition Universelle in 1900 contributed significantly to the fame of the painting, which was further spread by its inclusion in an elaborate collection of plates.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for providing this catalogue entry.