Shearing Sheep

Shearing Sheep, painted in 1852 and now in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, is among Millet's earliest representations of the annual sheepshearing — a subject that returned in his 1857 Art Institute version and that engaged his sustained interest in the tactile intimacy of man working closely with animal. The 1852 date places this in his early Barbizon period, when he was still working out the visual language that would distinguish his peasant subjects from both the academic tradition and the sentimental genre painting of the period. Shearing required skill and calm: a panicking sheep could injure itself or the shearer, and the task imposed a disciplined quietness on the participants. This quality — of concentrated, skilled calm — was one Millet associated broadly with the best of peasant labour and that he sought to convey through posture, physical relationship, and the stillness of the composition.

The close physical relationship between shearer and animal is organised so that both bodies create a compact, self-contained unit within the picture plane. Millet used the whiteness of the fleece as a compositional anchor — it is the lightest tone in a palette of warm browns and muted greens.