End of the Hamlet of Gruchy

Jean-Baptiste Faure was the leading baritone of the Paris Opéra in the 1860s. He created Posa in Verdi's Don Carlos in 1867 and the title role in Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet the year after, and he spent his fees on pictures. This one seems to have reached him through the dealers a few years after Millet showed it at the Salon of 1866. It is the last house of Gruchy, the hamlet on the Normandy cliffs where Millet grew up. Past a low stone wall and a single wind-bent tree the ground stops, and the sea fills the rest of the view. Two figures sit on the wall, geese and ducks wander by a trickle of water, and by the house door stand two chairs and a spinning wheel. Millet painted it from memory and from studies made some ten years before, and he wrote to his agent about this coast, 'Oh you spaces that made me dream so much in my childhood, will I ever be able to give a hint of what you are like?' In June 1873 Faure sent the canvas to auction in Paris with 30 other pictures. Faure went on to collect Manet, and came to own 67 of his canvases.