id: 147521 accession number: 1973.31 share license status: CC0 url: https://clevelandart.org/art/1973.31 updated: 2024-03-26 01:59:34.561000 The Little Milkmaid, c. 1865. Théodule Ribot (French, 1823–1891). Oil on fabric; unframed: 46.3 x 38.3 cm (18 1/4 x 15 1/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund 1973.31 title: The Little Milkmaid title in original language: series: series in original language: creation date: c. 1865 creation date earliest: 1860 creation date latest: 1870 current location: creditline: Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund copyright: --- culture: France, 19th century technique: oil on fabric department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960 type: Painting find spot: catalogue raisonne: --- CREATORS * Théodule Ribot (French, 1823–1891) - artist Théodule Ribot first tried to study art at the trade school in Châlons, École des Arts et Métiers. When his father died in 1840, Ribot had to help support his family. He worked as a bookkeeper in Rouen, married early, and left for Paris in 1845. There he did various jobs, studied in the atelier of Auguste-Barthélémy Glaize (1807-1893), and, in 1848, went to Algeria to work as a foreman for three years. Back in Paris, he befriended the painter Bonvin (q.v.), who held an exhibition of pictures by his friends in his studio in 1859. These artists, including Fantin-Latour (q.v.), Alphonse Legros (1837-1911), Antoine Vollon (1833-1900), and J. A. M. Whistler (1834-1903), depicted ordinary subjects from their immediate environments without relying on narrative, and they generally used somber colors, limited illumination, and broader brushwork that contrasted with academic standards and methods. Their work elicited a positive response from Courbet (q.v.), considered the father of realism in France. Ribot first exhibited at a Paris Salon in 1861, when his kitchen scenes won generally favorable reviews. To underscore a humble life-style for the artist, his early biographers claim that the dark, inky backgrounds of his pictures were the result of Ribot's painting by lamplight in his free evenings at home. He continued to depict working-class and peasant subjects in a style variously described as Dutch or Spanish by critics, and he participated in the Salons and provincial and international art exhibitions. Always interested in expanding exhibition opportunities for independent painters like himself, he signed a petition in 1863 that decried the Salon jury's numerous rejections that year and contributed to the official decision to hold the Salon des Refusés. Ribot sold his pictures through art galleries in Paris, such as those of Louis Martinet, Alfred Cadart, and Bernheim Jeune, and the French state bought his St. Sebastian (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) in 1865. In 1878 he was named to the Legion of Honor. The following year a serious illness kept Ribot from painting for two years, and his production fell off after this period. In 1884 his fellow artists, including Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), Boudin (q.v.), Fantin-Latour, Monet (q.v.), Puvis de Chavannes (q.v.), and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), held a banquet in his honor and gave him a medal inscribed "To Théodule Ribot, the independent painter." It is ironic, then, that the year after his death a major retrospective exhibition was organized at the official art school, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. --- measurements: Unframed: 46.3 x 38.3 cm (18 1/4 x 15 1/16 in.) state of the work: edition of the work: support materials: inscriptions: inscription: Signed lower left: t. Ribot translation: remark: --- CURRENT EXHIBITIONS title: Dutch Art and Life in the Seventeenth Century opening date: 1973-07-10T04:00:00 Dutch Art and Life in the Seventeenth Century. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (July 10-September 2, 1973). title: Year in Review: 1973 opening date: 1974-01-30T05:00:00 Year in Review: 1973. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 30-March 17, 1974). title: The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830 - 1900 opening date: 1980-11-12T05:00:00 The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830 - 1900. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 12, 1980-January 18, 1981). title: Redefining Genre: French and American Painting 1850-1900 opening date: 1995-09-24T04:00:00 Redefining Genre: French and American Painting 1850-1900. Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN (September 24-December 17, 1995); Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, FL (January 5-February 4, 1996); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA (February 24-April 21, 1996). --- LEGACY EXHIBITIONS * {'description': "Exposition Thedule Ribot. Palais National de l'École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France (1892).", 'opening_date': None} * {'description': 'Exposition Ribot. Bernheim Jeune & Cie, Paris, France (February 2-8, 1911).', 'opening_date': '1911-02-02T00:00:00'} --- PROVENANCE (Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April 6, 1882, no. 82, probably sold to Bernheim-Jeune) date: 1882 footnotes: *
“Bernheim,” presumably referring to Bernheim-Jeune, is written in as the buyer of the Ribot in an annotated copy of the sale catalogue.  
citations: (Probably Bernheim-Jeune, Paris) date: 1882- footnotes: citations: Consul Eduard Friedrich Weber [1830-1907], Hamburg date: By 1892 - by 1896 footnotes: *
Weber is listed as the owner of a painting, La petite laitière, with a title and size matching those of the CMA picture in an 1892 exhibition of works by Ribot.  It seems unusual that the painting was with Weber in 1892, and was subsequently sold in the estate sale of Ribot’s widow in 1896.  But because the Cleveland painting appears neither in an 1887 auction of paintings from his collection, nor in a 1907 catalogue of his nineteenth-century paintings, it is possible that Weber sold the work privately and it was eventually added to the estate sale in 1896. 
citations: (Ribot (his widow) estate sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, France, May 30, 1896, no. 3) date: 1896 footnotes: citations: (Probably Bernheim-Jeune, Paris) date: 1911 footnotes: *
The Ribot was likely exhibited at Bernheim-Jeune in the 1911 Exposition T. Ribot (no. 13, La petite laitière), as art historian Gabriel Weisberg does not believe that the artist painted any other versions of the subject.  
citations: (Bernheim-Jeune, Paris) date: 1931- footnotes: *
It appears that this painting was once again with Bernheim-Jeune: the presence of a Bernheim-Jeune stock number (6292) on the stretcher corresponds to the gallery's purchase of Ribot's "Jeune fille au chien" in June 1931 from an unidentified seller.  The gallery's archives do not record the date it was sold to the subsequent owner.
citations: (Galerie Brame and Lorenceau, Paris, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) date: By 1972-1973 footnotes: citations: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH date: 1973- footnotes: citations: --- fun fact: digital description: wall description: --- RELATED WORKS --- CITATIONS Hôtel Drouot. Catalogue de tableaux modernes. April 6, 1882. page number: url: Hôtel Drouot. Catalogue de tableaux modernes. April 6, 1882. page number: url: Sertrat, Raoul. Exposition Th. Ribot: au Palais national de l'École des beaux-arts : ouverte du 3 mai au 31 mai 1892. Paris: Impr. de l'art, E. Ménard, 1892. page number: url: Hôtel Drouot. Tableaux, études, aquarelles, dessins par Théodule Ribot. May 30, 1896. page number: url: Ribot, Théodule. Exposition Ribot: du jeudi 2 au mercredi 8 février 1911 ... : Paris ... chez MM. Bernheim Jeune & cie. Paris: Bernheim Jeune, 1911. page number: url: Gabriel P. Weisberg, fax to Roger Diederen, Jan. 25, 1996, in CMA curatorial file. page number: url: Guy-Patrice Dauberville, letter to Victoria Sears Goldman, Feb. 2, 2016, in CMA curatorial file. page number: url:
d'Argencourt, Louise, Roger Diederen, and Alisa Luxenberg. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999. page number: url: Lefort, Paul. "Theodule Ribot." Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1891): 298-309. page number: url: Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1973." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art LXI, no. 2 (February, 1974):31-78. page number: Reproduced: p. 50; Mentioned: p. 74, no. 42 url: "Recent Accessions of American and Canadian Museums." The Art Quarterly 37 (Spring 1974): 98-114. page number: Mentioned: P. 101; reproduced: P. 112 url: Weisberg, Gabriel P. "Theodule Ribot: Popular Imagery and The Little Milkmaid." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art LXIII, no. 10 (October, 1976):253-263. page number: Reproduced: p. 2545, fig. 1; Mentioned: p. 262, no. 4 url: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978. page number: Reproduced: p. 212 url: https://archive.org/details/CMAHandbook1978/page/n232 Weisberg, Gabriel P. The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830-1900. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980. page number: Referenced: no. 9, p., 47, Reproduced url: Sutton, Denys. “Cross-Currents in Nineteenth-Century French Painting.” Apollo: The International Magazine of Art & Antiques 113 (April 1981): 244–54. page number: Reproduced: P. 248, fig. 11 url: Chong, Alan. European & American Painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art: A Summary Catalogue. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1993. page number: Reproduced: P. 198 url: D'Argencourt, Louise and Roger Diederen. The Cleveland Museum of Art: Catalogue of Paintings, Part Four; European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999. page number: Reproduced: p. 190 url: Faroult, Guillaume and Sophie Eloy. La collection La Caze: chefs-d'œuvre des peintures des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris, France: Musée du Louvre, 2007. page number: Reproduced: p. 137, fig. 105 url: Weisberg, Gabriel P. "Theodule Ribot: la Vie dans l'Art." In Théodule Ribot, 1823-1891: Une Délicieuse Obscurité. Emmanuelle Delapierre, Luc Georget, Gabriel Weisberg, eds., 22-35. Paris: LienArt, 2021. page number: Mentioned and reproduced: P. 30, fig. 7 url: --- IMAGES web: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1973.31/1973.31_web.jpg print: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1973.31/1973.31_print.jpg full: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1973.31/1973.31_full.tif