Alfred Sensier, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1850)
Laurent-Richard, Paris (and sold: his sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 23-25, 1875, no. 51, illustrated)
Levy-Crémieu, Paris (and sold: his sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 15, 1886, no. 19)
Mrs. W. A. Slater, Washington, D.C.
Frank D. Stout, Chicago
Mrs. August Kern, Chicago (by descent from the above and sold: Sotheby's, London, June 28, 1972, lot 1, illustrated)
The Shoshana Collection
Sale: Sotheby's, London, June 23, 1987, no. 27, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Grand Palais, Jean-François Millet,🔜 1975ඣ, no. 54 (and London, Hayward Gallery, reduced version of same exhibition, as no. 35

Tokyo, Bunkamura Museum of Art; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Kofu, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, Jean-François Millet, 1991, no. 16
Nagoya, City Art Museum; Morioka, Iwate Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Museum of Art, Van Gogh, Millet and the Barbizon Artists, 2004, no. 32

Alfred Sensier and Paul Mantz, La Vie et l'oeuvre de Jean-François Millet, Paris, 1881, pp. 133, 187-88
Bénézit-Constant, Le Livre d'or de J.-F. Millet par un ancien ami, Paris, 1891, pp. 60-61
L. Roger-Milès, Le Paysan dans l'oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, Paris, 1895, illustrated
Julia Cartwright, Jean François Millet, His Life and Times, New York, 1896, pp. 115-17
Camille Mauclair, The Great French Painters, London, 1903, illustrated op. p. 124
Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, Paris, 1921, vol. I, pp. 85, 90, fig. 60; vol. II, p. 3
Drawings by J. F. Millet, exh. cat., London 1956, cited under no. 7
A. Reverdy, L'École de Barbizon, l'Évolution du Prix des Tableaux de 1850 à 1960, Paris, 1973, p. 122

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting has been quite recently restored. The canvas has been lined with wax and the surface is stable. Under ultraviolet light the original paint reads quite strongly in some places, yet none of this appears to correspond to retouching and it is more than likely that this picture is not retouched at all. The condition is excellent and the painting should be hung as is.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Jean-François Millet began The Young Seamstresses in 1848-49 during his last months in Paris and finished the picture soon after he moved his young family to Barbizon, the small rural village with which his art is so closely entwined.  This is the same period in which Millet was also working on a larger figure of a solitary Sower (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) destined for the Salon of 1850.  Whether working for public exhibition, or for the more personal audience of a private collector as he did with The Young Seamstresses, in these crucial pictures Millet set out his commitment to truly see and truthfully depict the tasks ไa༺nd the labors around which real lives were built.

In the glancing light of a deep-set window, The Young Seamstresses are bent intently over the linens gathered up across their laps.  With their balanced gestures and closely observed hands, Millet conveyed the back and forth motions of sewing as well as the delicacy of their stitches.  The few simple furnishings -- a basket of fabric remnants, a single ball of thread, two pressing irons hung high on a rail above -- fill out the narrow realm of their lives and make clear these two young women worked in a simple village home.  With a mixture of long supple brush strokes and sharp, tacky paint touches, Millet captured up the well-worn fabrics and nubby knits of the seamstresses' garments.  His deliberate color scheme uses rich red and turquoise notes in the costume of the closer seamstress to set off the wonderfully complex interplay of quieter whites and grays, pale yellow and faint blue, that give weight to the linens and so solidly shape the figures.  Throughout The Young Seamstresses, there are echoes of the seventeenth-century Dutch realists whom Millet admired, and certainly of Chardin.  But it is Millet's engagement with the colorful innovations of the Romantic movement of the 1840s and particularly Delacroix, and his own fundamental aspiration to make figure draftsmanship responsive to real figures in a real world that mark The Young Seamstresses as a critical step into his mature vision.

The Young Seamstresses was purchased from Millet for the modest sum of 100 francs by a civil servant, Alfred Sensier, who had befriended the artist shortly after Millet arrived in Paris.  Sensier worked in the arts ministry and took a deep personal interest in the young realist artists of his own generation.  He was intimately involved in supporting and encouraging the often hard-pressed Millet and would ultimately become the artist's de facto agent in Paris, his landlord in Barbizon, and his biographer.  As one of his first purchases from Millet, The Young Seamstresses proved an extremely effective pawn in Sensier's machinations on Millet's behalf.  Sensier arranged for the painting to he hung in the office of the Minister responsible for public grants, despite Minister Romieu's avowed distaste for an artist whom he took to be a subversive.  When the famed academic master Paul Delaroche admired the painting on 𝐆a visit to Romieu's offices, the minister was startled and; after Delaroche acknowledged that Millet had been his own pupil, albeit a headstrong one, Romieu was won over to Sensier's purposes.  In 1852 he approved the♈ official commission of a painting from Millet, an important financial boon at a critical moment in the artist's career.

The Young Seamstresses is based upon a beautiful Millet drawing in the Perth Art Gallery; and during the 1850s, Millet took up the basic composition of The Two Seamstresses again for a finished draꦛwing (Worcester Art Museum), another painting (Museum of F🥂ine Arts, Boston) and an etching.