In the Vineyard

Around 1852 Alfred Feydeau, an architect and a friend of Millet's, asked him for a set of four small paintings of the seasons. For spring, Millet chose a job in the vineyard. In the foreground a man in a broad-brimmed hat bends to tie a young vine to its stake, a bundle of straw ties at his back. Behind him a second man, half hidden in the tall green growth, hammers more stakes into the ground. It is the work that decides the harvest months before anyone sees a grape, done on a slope under a pale sky. The picture was finished in 1852 or 1853. Summer from the same set shows gleaners in a stubble field, and it is now in Japan, at the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art. Millet would come back to the four seasons twice more in the 1860s, for other patrons.