Hamlet in a Wheat Field, Vichy

Jean-François Millet

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art