Study for Flax Pulling

Jean François Millet · c. 1852

Medium

Graphite, with black chalk, heightened with white gouache, on ivory laid paper, laid down on cream wove paper

Original size

23 × 17.2 cm (9 1/16 × 6 13/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

*Study for Flax Pulling* offers a rare glimpse into Millet's working process — a quietly powerful drawing in which stooped figures emerge from the page with a solidity that belies the delicacy of graphite and chalk. Millet spent much of his career in the village of Barbizon on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he devoted himself to depicting the dignity of rural peasant labor. This preparatory study, worked up with careful white gouache highlights on ivory laid paper, shows the same monumental weight he would later bring to finished canvases — the bowed backs of flax-pullers rendered not with pity but with deep respect. His sympathy for agricultural workers was rooted in lived experience: Millet was born into a Norman farming family in Gruchy and rarely strayed far from that world. Van Gogh revered Millet above almost any other artist, making more than twenty painted copies after his compositions and writing that he considered him "a guide and counsellor in everything." The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the tonal depth and quiet humanity of the original into a medium that rewards close looking, carrying forward the weight and warmth that made Millet's vision endure.