Millet's Family Home at Gruchy

The house where Millet was born still stands at Gruchy, a hamlet on the cliffs west of Cherbourg, though most of what visitors see there today is a reconstruction. Millet painted the lane beside it in 1854. A high bank of turf and stone rises on the left, topped with trees, and a small figure in red stands half hidden among them. At the right the pale wall of the house runs back along the lane, where a few white geese pick at the dust. He never signed the canvas. The name in the lower right corner is the stamp put on the works left in his studio when they were sold after his death. The house passed to his brother Auguste, and later a nephew sold it to an American painter, who ran a painting school there in the early 1900s. By 1925 it stood empty. In 1944, during the fighting in the Cotentin, an American Sherman tank firing at German coastal defences hit its front, and in the years after, the roof, the timbers and the upper floor fell in. The département of the Manche rebuilt it, and it opened as a museum on 2 July 1997.