Gift from the Estate of Dr. Joan C. Huntley

Jean-François Millet painted Sheep Grazing along a Hedgerow in 1861-62 in response to a direct request from Urbain Calmette, an eccentric bookseller in Cahors (near Bordeaux) who had approached the artist a few years earlier wishing to swap a cask of good local wine for a small painting and was fast becoming a Millet family friend as well as patron. Sheep Grazing along a Hedgerow is reminiscence of Miller's beloved Normandy and is a slightly smaller, much more freely painted variant of another picture of the same title that Millet had completed earlier in 1861 for the dealers Ennemond Blanc and Arthur Stevens (The Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan).

The small flock of sheep being moved down a country lane in Sheep Grazing along a Hegerow are watched over by a blue tunicked gamer just barely discernible through the foliage on the right. That the scene is near Grouchy, Millet's native Normandy, rather than Barbozon -- where he also followed and recorded the itinerant shepherds with their larger Glocks moving across the open plain -- is established by the lush green foliage that covers the high-banked hedgerows separating fields. Sheep, in their contrasting habits of massing and straggling as they wandered, were endlessly fascinating to Millet and the detail of a single animal stretching its neck well above the flock to reach the freshest young leaves had become a classic Millet motif that appears in many of his paintings and drawings. Distinctive in Sheep Grazing along a Hedgerow is Millet's interest in the strong juxtaposition of sunlight and shadow, so emblematic of any passage through a deep-set Normandy lane, and which here threatens to dissolve the center of the flock into an amorphous mass of bright white wool. Not yet an Impressionist, Millet was nonetheless attentive to the fluctuations of light and as well as the realization of the characteristic Cotentin seacoast humidity.

Jean-Urbain Clamette was paintings lover, book seller, and small-scale vintner who approached Millet quite out of the blue in 1859 asking if he might trade a cask of wine for a small painting from the master. At the time, Millet's circle of private patrons were primarily Parisian, often fellow artists or bureaucrats, and he was charmed by Calmette's determination in tacking him down from so far. He agreed to the exchange, offering an unidentified Shepherdess painting. A warm correspondence developed between the Cahorsien and the artists and their connection ultimately extended to Millet's whole family (and closest Barbizon friends, Theodore Rousseau and Alfred Sensor), and was marked by gifts of Bordeaux grapes and truffled capons from the bookseller/sometimes farmer. In the summer of 1861, Calmette visited Barbizon where he presumably saw the version of Sheep Grazing along a Hedgerow (The Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan) which Millet was just finishing in compliance with a difficult contract with the dealers Ennemond Blanc and Arthur Stevens. When Calmette trued to buy that painting, Millet wrote he was unable to sell it but offered to paint a different version. Sheep Grazing along a Hedgerow is not a sketch for the larger work but rather a much more loosely painted variant, reminiscent of the pastels on which Millet was concurrently experimenting. The broadly hailed paint work is a reflection of the shared appreciation of techniques that united artist and patron, and the simplified J.F.M. signature is a very rarely used recognition of their closeness.

Sotheby's, European Art, 24 May 2017, lot 61