Woman Reclining in a Landscape

In the mid-1840s Millet was in Paris with Catherine Lemaire, the young woman who would become his second wife, and he paid the rent with small pictures for dealers and private buyers. Many were like this one. A young woman, her white shift slipping from her shoulders, lies on the grass in a dark wood at the edge of a pool. The canvas is tiny, under 19 centimetres high, and quickly brushed. A well-known story is attached to the end of this phase. According to Alfred Sensier, Millet's friend and first biographer, the painter once stood behind two young men looking at one of his bathers in a shop window, and heard one tell the other it was by a certain Millet, who painted nothing but naked women. Sensier says the remark stung, and that Millet decided then to leave such subjects behind and paint country life. Historians handle the anecdote with care. Sensier published it after Millet's death, and the painter went on making the occasional nude for some time after the day it supposedly happened.