Priory at Vauville, Normandy

In 1250 Eudes Rigaud, archbishop of Rouen, was inspecting the monasteries of his province, and at Vauville, on the heath above the bay at the north-western tip of Normandy, he found a priory of four monks and reprimanded them for not keeping the rule. The house had been founded in the 12th century by a local knight, Richard de Vauville, and settled with Benedictines from the abbey of Cerisy. By the 19th century the monks were long gone. In 1819 the Norman antiquary Charles de Gerville found only walls round an empty yard and a chapel in use as a barn. That is the place Millet painted for a Boston collector, who ordered the picture in 1872 and received it in 1874. A stony track climbs toward the walls, the grey chapel with its small bell-cote rises behind them, and beyond lies the sea under a pale, hazy sky. German troops who occupied the priory in the Second World War took the bell down from that bell-cote, and it has never been recovered.