Millet2022

Geneva, Switzerland, Musée d’art et d’histoire de la Ville de Genève, Exposition de l’Art Francais à Genève , May 15-June 16, 1918, no. 289.

Millet created this drawing in November of 1863, as he was beginning work on a a large etching based broadly on a painting of the same subject painted in 1851-53. Our drawing is one of two full-size, quite complete preparatory drawings which lay out the full composition for the etching, concentrating in particular on the figures. Six additional drawings, more loosely drawn or focused on details or a single figure are known for the etching project. The subject of Le Départ pour le travail is a young peasant couple setting off at the beginning of the day to harvest potatoes, the staple of their diet. In the deep distance, buildings suggest the village from which they set out, while behind the young man, another peasant, seated on one horse and leading a second, moves toward a large plow left abandoned in the field the day before and visible just to the side of the young woman. Millet had painted two variant images of the subject early in the 1850s, com- parable in the pairing of the walking couple, but with a different, less detailed background. Scholars have often remarked on the symbolic similarities be- tween Millet’s young couple and several Renaissance images of Adam and Eve, walking side by side, as they were forced out of Paradise, condemned to labor for their daily bread; and it seems quite likely that Millet had those works in mind when he composed his pair, for he often spoke of the harshness of daily life in Biblical terms, and others of his French peasant farm worker scenes have their roots in Biblical stories or religious aphorisms. But the precision of his peasants’ tools, the quirkiness of the young woman’s decision to wear her empty potato basket as a sort of sun-bonnet, and the specifically Barbizon-like details of the distant walled-village also demonstrate how firmly grounded in real-world experience and observation were Millet’s modern revisions of age- old tales.