A Fazenda

By 1925 Joan Miró had carried this canvas from a farmhouse in Catalonia to a cramped Paris studio, working at it for nine months to get every furrow and animal right. That winter a young, still-unknown American writer saw it and wanted it. Ernest Hemingway scraped the money together from friends around the Paris cafés and took it home, and he kept it the rest of his life. What Miró painted is an inventory of his family's farm at Mont-roig, the cracked earth, a eucalyptus tree at the centre, a snail, a watering can, footprints, each thing given equal weight, as if seen in a dream rather than a field. He compared the effort of making it to carrying a child.