PARIS, FRANCE.- The Musée d'Orsay presents an exhibition of drawings by Jean-François Millet until September 3. The Musée d'Orsay collection, housed in the Cabinet des Arts Graphiques du Musée du Louvre, includes the most important group of existing drawings by Jean-François Millet. It is comprised of sketches, life studies, first thoughts, most of them originating from the artist's studio.

These drawings had a great influence on Degas, Pissarro, Seurat and Van Gogh, as well as on the official proponents of academic naturalism, such as Breton and Lhermitte. This paradoxical but fruitful line of descent reflects their complex character. These works combine a realism that sweeps away all academic conventions and an idealisation related to a synthetic search for form, which carries the seeds of a powerful aesthetic evolution, without breaking away from the tradition of great masters.

This exhibition of some fifty pieces from the collection in the Musée d'Orsay Graphic Arts Gallery (level 0, on the Rue de Lille side) is an opportunity, until 3 September, to rediscover Millet as a draughtsman. On the occasion of this event, the Musée d'Orsay and 5 Continents Editions have published jointly a 96-page catalogue including about sixty illustrations.