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Jean-François MILLET

Price Tax incl.:
8500 EUR

Woman hanging laundry, ca. 1847-1850 MILLET Jean-François (Gréville-Hague 1814 † 1875 Barbizon) Original etching and drypoint. H98(92)xW89(100)mm. Proof mounted on thin vellum. A small epidermure on the dress, at chest level. Lateral edges imperfectly inked. Delteil, Melot, n°2 One of the artist's earliest etchings. Part of the "three subjects" plate. Rare proof on pink paper, of the plate's main motif, before numerous roulette scratches. Small unbalanced margins. Extremely rare: Delteil reports only ten proofs of the Planche aux trois sujets on old laid paper (one preserved at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art), and one on Japon paper. The Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery each hold a proof of the first subject, slightly different in size from ours (98 x 89 mm and 92 x 100 mm respectively). Millet left only a small number of etchings (twenty-one in all, according to Alfred Lebrun). According to Béraldi and Delteil, this very rare plate, whose copper was also used to engrave Le petit pêcheur au repos (B.3) and Croquis d'un paysan assis, appuyé sur le bras gauche (B.7), is one of his very first etchings. Printing was still experimental and rudimentary, to say the least, as Millet had neither suitable ink nor a printing press at his disposal. As Alfred Lebrun points out, the young artist printed them himself, "with color rather than printing ink33". Frederick Keppel also points out that Millet's custom at the time was to print his proof by hand, directly against the plate, rubbing it with the back of a spoon. This imperfect manual process makes each print completely unique. What's more, Millet never seems to have used the same paper, or the same printing color: while our proof is printed in black on a fairly deep pink paper, the one from Yale is printed in a bistre tone tending to orange, on grayish paper, and the one from Chicago, imperfectly inked on its right-hand side, in black on ivory vellum. The heterogeneity of these proofs clearly proves their trial nature, and enhances their interest.

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