Peasant Watering Her Cow

The museum's record gives the technique of this canvas as oil over black conté crayon. Conté is a hard drawing stick of graphite or pigment bound with clay, invented in Paris in the 1790s by the chemist Nicolas-Jacques Conté, and Millet used it for drawing all his working life. Here he drew the whole scene on the canvas first and only then painted over it in oil. It is dusk at a pond. A woman in a pale headscarf and a long grey skirt stands on the stony bank, holding a rope while a tawny cow wades in and lowers its head to drink. Its reflection runs down into the still water. Behind her the bushes are dark, a thatched cottage sits on the left, and far off on the flat horizon a line of animals is heading home. The canvas is dated to about 1863, and Millet signed it with his initials only, J. F. M., in the lower right corner.