Two Reclining Figures

Nobody recorded what Millet called this picture, and the Boston museum gives it a plain descriptive title. It is dated to about 1848. In the grass at the left a young woman in a loose white blouse, a blue band in her hair, rests on her folded arms and looks off to one side. Close beside her, wrapped in a heavy rust-red cloak, a second figure leans in with the head bowed. The canvas is about a metre wide, and much of it is left rough. The dark bank behind the pair and the clouded sky above them are hardly more than scrubbed, broken layers of paint. Around 1853 it was among the pictures the American painter William Morris Hunt bought from Millet, and Hunt still had it in 1874, when he sold it to another Boston collector.