The Church of Gréville

Millet died in January 1875, and that May the works left in his studio were auctioned in Paris. The state bought this canvas at the sale, and before the month was out it hung in the Musée du Luxembourg. It shows the church at Gréville, on the Normandy coast, where he had gone to Mass every Sunday with his parents as a boy. He came back to that coast in 1870 to escape the war with Prussia, and in 1873 he told the English painter Henry Wallis he still hadn't caught the impression the place had made on him as a child. Beside the building, the passing peasant and the sheep are tiny. In the Luxembourg that year the picture was seen by a 22-year-old Vincent van Gogh. Eight years later, out in the Dutch province of Drenthe, he wrote of finding an old church 'just exactly the church at Gréville in Millet's little painting'.