Haystacks: Autumn

From The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide, 1983 page 229.

Click to enlarge.

130 JEAN-FRANcOIS MILLET, French, 1814-1875
Haystacks: Autumn
Oil on canvas; 331/2 x 43% in. (85.1 x 110.2 cm)

This picture is from a series depicting the four seasons that the industrialist Frederick Hartmann commissioned in 1868. Millet, a member of the Barbizon school, worked on the group intermittently during the next seven years. He completed Spring (Louvre, Paris) in 1873; by spring 1874 he reported that Summer: Buckwheat Harvest (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Haystacks: Autumn were almost finished. Winter: The Woodgatherers (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff) was incomplete when he died. Series of paintings depicting the seasons had long been created by European artists, but during the nineteenth century the subject grew increasingly rare. Bequest of Lillian S. Timken, 1959, 60.71.12