Forest with Shepherdess and Sheep

In 1850 Millet came to an arrangement with Alfred Sensier, a friend in Paris who became his agent. Sensier sent money and painting materials out to Barbizon, and in return he received drawings and pictures, while Millet stayed free to sell to anyone else. This little panel, dated 1849 to 1850, went from the painter straight to Sensier. It is under 28 centimetres high and barely 15 wide, and almost all of it is trees. Tall dark trunks fill the narrow panel, a pale streak of sky opens high on the right, and at the bottom a dark figure stands among the sheep, their pale backs just showing. Sensier died in 1877, leaving unfinished the book he was writing on Millet's life, which the critic Paul Mantz completed and published in 1881. That December Sensier's collection was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, and this panel, lot 53, went to the dealer Alphonse Legrand, probably on behalf of Quincy Adams Shaw of Boston.