Seated Spinner (Emélie Millet)

Millet's mother died in 1853 at Gruchy, the hamlet on the Normandy coast near Cherbourg where he was born. The following summer he went back there with his own family to settle her affairs, and stayed for several months. This small panel comes out of that stay. The woman at the wheel is his sister Émélie, two years younger than he was. She sits on a straw-seated chair in a white cap and a long apron, feeding fibre from the distaff into the turning wheel, her eyes on her hands. Behind her is the dim interior of a Norman farmhouse, the kind of room Millet had grown up in. He painted it on wood, only 35 centimetres high, and tucked a cat asleep under her chair.