Woman Feeding Her Children
Jean-François Millet, 1860
For now, just to look at
The photograph we have of this work is not sharp enough to print at the quality we want, so we are not selling it for now. We are looking for a better one.
About the work
- Artist
- Jean-François Millet
- Date
- 1860
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Collection
- Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille
- Reference
- XDV-2550
What the museum label doesn't tell you
Look at the three children's heads, tilted the same way toward their mother's spoon, as if waiting for a beak bigger than their own. That's deliberate: Millet told the critic Thoré-Burger he wanted viewers to picture exactly this, a brood being fed while the father works to keep them fed. And there, almost background noise, a real hen struts across the yard — his own metaphor slipping literally into the frame. 'La Becquée' (1860, oil on canvas, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille) grew out of sketches Millet had been reworking since 1848. Did you clock the hen, or just the kids?
