The Spinner, an Auvergne Goatherd

Millet spent three summers, from 1866 to 1868, at Vichy, where his wife Catherine was taking the waters. It put him a long way from Barbizon and from the flat fields outside Paris he had been painting for nearly 20 years, and he walked out into the Auvergne hills with a sketchbook. This goatherd came out of those walks, though the canvas itself was painted back at Barbizon in 1868 and 1869. She spins with a distaff and spindle, the oldest tools there are for the job, still in daily use in the Auvergne while the spinning mills of northern France ran on steam. In 1868 Millet was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, 11 years after The Gleaners had been denounced as a socialist picture.