1862
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
First Steps is a 1862 by Jean François Millet, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A toddler wobbles toward a woman kneeling in a sunlit garden, her arms outstretched. Behind them, a man leans on a fence, watching. Millet made this with pastel—soft, chalky sticks that let him add color fast. He hoped the color would sell better than his usual black-and-white sketches. Collectors loved them, and pastel became popular again because of him. Look up how pastel works in *sfumato*—a way to blend colors so they look soft, like smoke.
In the 1860s Jean-François Millet began to add pastel to his black chalk drawings of peasants and rural life, with the hope that the addition of color would make his monochromatic drawings more marketable. Between 1865 and 1869, he worked almost exclusively in pastel, producing more than 100 works. The taste for “enhanced” or “pastelled drawings,” as Millet described them, grew among collectors and artists, and inspired a revival of the medium in the 1870s and 1880s. Here, in a fenced-in garden behind a house, parents encourage their child to walk for the first time. Delicate passages of…
At the time this drawing was made, many critics disparaged Millet's depictions of peasants as politically radical.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jean-François Millet (French pronunciation: ; 4 October 1814 – 20 January 1875) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France.
See the richer artist page
