François Millet, 'The Church at Arbonne', 1870-80

A path leads across a grassy meadow to a church. To the left a figure in a red cap pastures two cows, and several chickens or ducks are scattered in the grass. To the right of an archway a waggon stands against the wall, its wheel picked out in a bluish-grey paint.

The church is the Norman church at Arbonne (now Arbonne-la-Forêt), a village to the southwest of Barbizon. The village of Barbizon, around 40 miles south of Paris, and the neighbouring forest of Fontainebleau were popular locations for artists, including Jean-François Millet (who settled there in 1849), Corot and several of the Impressionists, from around 1830 to 1870.

This picture was painted by Millet’s son, François Millet, who also made a preliminary drawing of the scene on blue paper. The signature and a written paper fragment on the back of the picture confirms this attribution. A pupil of his father, François emulated the elder Millet’s subject-matter, specialising in genre, landscape, still life and portraits. This particular image is indebted to Jean-François Millet’s Church at Gréville (between 1871 and 1874, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), a view of the church in Normandy which Millet had attended as a child. François Millet painted a copy of his father’s work (also dated to between 1871 and 1874), and this work was perhaps painted at the same period as a response. Both are peaceful and timeless scenes. The stately edifice set against an expressive sky in The Church at Arbonne echoes that in Jean-François Millet’s painting. He has also used similar brushwork of small touches of paint to evoke sunlight falling on stonework.

X-radiography has revealed another picture underneath, possibly a vertical landscape with a large tree just above the present church tower. This was probably painted by the same artist, who turned the canvas 90 degrees clockwise to create a horizontal format.