item details
Overview
Jean-Francois Millet (1814-75) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers; he can be categorised, along with his near contemporary, Gustave Courbet, as a principal exponent of the Realism art movement.
Potato harvest, sometimes known as Potato gatherers, is a lithograph that to many looks like a very passable reverse rendition in print of Millet's famous painting The potato harvest (1855; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), which portrays peasants' struggle for survival and their dependency on this 'lowly' vegetable. But there is no evidence that such a print was ever made, certainly not in Millet's lifetime, and it is not recorded in the catalogue raisonné by Loys Delteil, Le peintre-graveur illustré : J.F. Millet (1906). The lithographic stone, now in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, was 'rediscovered' and printed for the first time in 1920 by Francis Ernest Jackson, for the dealers Ernest Brown & Phillips in an edition of 200, of which this is no. 9. (This is confirmed in an inscription on the support.) It has subsequently been discovered that the stone was a fake made by Millet's grandson.
A further inscription on the Te Papa impression's suport appears to read 'Hardy': could this indicate that before it was acquired by Sir John Ilott, who later presented it to the National Art Gallery, that a former owner Martin Hardie (1875-1952), a printmaker of some distinction himself and a revered Keeper (Curator) of Prints and Drawings at the Victoria & Albert Museum fell for the fake? It's the sort of story that curators hate and the general public correspondingly love!
See:
British Museum Collection Online, 'Potato Harvest', http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1354892&partId=1&searchTe xt=jean+Francois+millet&page=2
Wikipedia, 'Jean-Francois Millet', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2018