Study for 'Mercury Leading the Cows of Argus to Water'

This 1846 study belongs to the pre-Barbizon phase of Millet's career, when he was still working in Paris and engaging with mythological subject matter alongside portraiture and early genre work. Mercury Leading the Cows of Argus to Water is drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses — specifically the episode in which Mercury, sent by Jupiter, seeks to lull the hundred-eyed giant Argus to sleep before slaying him and freeing the transformed Io. The choice of this particular moment, showing the god engaged in the mundane task of herding cattle, reflects Millet's characteristic instinct to locate the earthly and laborious even within mythological narrative. This study, now at LACMA, preceded the finished composition and shows the artist working through the figural arrangement and the relationship between Mercury's movement and the cattle. Studies of this kind were standard practice in the academic tradition, but Millet's interest in the herding activity itself — rather than the divine narrative — foreshadows the direction his mature work would take. He largely abandoned mythology after 1848, moving entirely into peasant subject matter.

As a preparatory study on canvas, the work has a more sketchlike character than Millet's finished works, with forms broadly indicated and relationships established without final resolution. The paint is applied with a looser hand, working out compositional problems of figure placement and movement.