Jean-François Millet

Alfred Sensier, Paris (acquired directly from the artist, and sold:  Paris, Hôtel Drouot, December 10-18, 1877, either lot 209 Paysans fauchant les foins  or more likely lot 215 Faucheurs dans la plaine
Détrimont, Paris)
Louis A. Frothingham,  Boston (by 1903)
Mrs. Louis A. Frothingham (née Mary S. Ames) (by descent from above, 1928)
Thence by descent to the present owners

The following condition report was kindly provided by Alvarez Replica Handbags Services Inc.: Overall this ink and charcoal on paper is in stable condition. The paper is glued to a similar weight secondary paper at the edges in a typical French manner and both are stretched over a 1/8" thick gray paperboard. The edges of the secondary paper are glued to the verso of the board causing mild planar distortions (cockling) throughout. Visually, the paper appears mildly oxidized throughout from contact with its acidic mount. And there are mild foxing stains found below-center and right side and a mild mat burn at the edges.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any stat.mes nt made by Replica Shoes 's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Jean-François Millet drew Workers Cutting Hay during the critical years around 1848-52, as he was throwing himself into the realization of his long-held dream to create an art based on the real world of the working people among whom he himself had grown up.  The central figure of a man bending into a wide slash of his heavy scythe (un faneur), which would become a favorite subject for Millet, makes his first appearance in Workers Cutting Hay, and at least four of the single figures or groups that fill out the hay-cutting narrative across the background also feature in later Millet drawings and pastels.

Workers Cutting Hay has been unrecorded since it passed in a Paris sale in 1877, but its size and format  relate the work to a group of twenty drawings that was assembled by Alfred Sensier (Millet's long-t.mes friend and biographer) under the title  L'Epopée des Champs (Epic of the Fields). Although the variety of media and occasional repetition of subjects among the eight or ten drawings in the group which can be identified today suggest that Millet never intended the drawings to  fill out a formal series, they do demonstrate the artist's careful development of compositional strategies and drawing techniques that would be central to his exploration of the new terrain around Barbizon to which he moved in 1849.  Too few of the Epopée drawings are presently known (as is the case generally with Millet's works around the Revolution of 1848) to say with certainly whether Workers Cutting Hay was drawn after Millet's arrival in Barbizon or earlier, but the combination of pen and ink with charcoal in the work relates  the drawing to other Millet compositions inspired by scenes he observed on the rural outskirts of northern  Paris.

Workers Cutting Hay has descended through two Boston families who were prominent in collects ing French art, the Frothinghams and Ames's, at least since 1903; and it is probable that the work has actually been in Boston at least since the 1880s.  The framer and dealer Détrimont, who worked with Millet as early as the 1850s and whose mark is on the verso of the frame, collaborated closely with several Boston collects ors during the 1870s and 1880s.