Millet's La 'Becquee' (1848-1860) at the Lille Musee des Beaux Arts

This article shows that a previously unpublished drawing by J. -F. Millet representing a woman feeding children, recently acquired by the Musee des Beux-arts, Lille, is a work of the revolutionary years 1848-1849. It is closely related to a small oil painting on the same theme that probably represented Charity, and a decade later it served as the first idea for Lille's famous canvas of 1860, Le Becquee. The author establishes a chronology of all the known drawings and pastels related to the painting, in the process re-dating two important works. Lille's newly acquired drawing is shown to partake of the mood of 1848, whereas the museum's painting evokes instead the harmonious lives of poor but industrious rural people. Thore-Burger's views of Millet are introduced to point to the artist's dual heritage. On the one hand, his images of peasants eventually entered into conventional bourgeois myth-making but, on the other, as Thore wrote, his honest naturalism had "un certain caractere subversif" ("a certain subversive quality") that explains his defiance of convention and his formative role in the work of Pissarro, van Gogh, and other vanguardists of the following generation.