Vintage Art Print No. 0033

In the summers of 1866−68, Millet accompanied his wife to the spa town of Vichy in central France. As he explored the unfamiliar region, he produced a significant corpus of drawings that mark a shift from the peasant subjects for which he was renowned to a focus on pure landscape. Here, the softening of the long, vertical strokes of brown ink with a wet brush conveys a sense of movement at the edge of the wheat field. The strikingly bare foreground may have been inspired by Japanese woodblock prints that the artist began collecting in 1863.