The sheepfold, moonlight

Millet painted this small wooden panel around 1872, back at Barbizon after sitting out the war of 1870 in Cherbourg, near the coast where he grew up. On the open plain between Barbizon and Chailly, shepherds penned their flocks at night inside folds of hurdles set up on the fields, and he had already painted a moonlit version of the scene in the late 1850s, now in Baltimore. Here the moon hangs low above the horizon. The sheep are a pale mass behind the fence, and the shepherd is only a dark shape at the edge of the pen. More than half the panel is sky. It later belonged to Émile Gavet, a Paris architect who had commissioned many of the painter's pastels, and it was shown at the world's fair of 1889.