The woodcutter

When the collector Georges Thomy Thiéry started buying pictures, he set himself a precise goal, one work each by 12 painters of the Romantic generation he ranked above the rest, among them Corot, Delacroix, Théodore Rousseau and Millet. The plan got away from him. By his death in 1902 he owned 121 paintings and some 140 bronzes by the animal sculptor Barye, and he left them all to the Louvre, which gives his collection a room of its own, Room 951. This small canvas is one of his Millets. At the edge of a wood, a man seen in profile raises a billhook over a block, chopping branches to length for faggots, the bundles of sticks that fed ovens and hearths. A few finished bundles are stacked at the left. The Louvre dates it only broadly, between 1850 and 1875, the years Millet spent at Barbizon.