Still Life

Millet painted very few still lifes, so this one sits oddly among all the fields and field workers. It is usually dated to the first half of the 1860s, by which time his peasant subjects had steady buyers.

Everything that happened to it afterwards happened in the Netherlands. Some time before 1886 it was bought from the Hague art dealers Van Wisselingh by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, a painter of the North Sea who put his earnings into French pictures, and by his wife Sientje Mesdag-van Houten, a painter as well. In May 1903 the couple gave their private museum, collection and all, to the Dutch state. The still life travelled with that collection, kept by the Mauritshuis in The Hague from 1934, and by the Van Gogh Museum since 1990.