Given its framing and graphic quality, our drawing could be a highly accomplished preparatory study for an unfinished woodcut from the Paysages Bretons suite, which would explain why certain details (notably the women gathering pine needles) are cut out and placed back in the landscape. Rivière also included this group of women several times in his engraved corpus, in the form of an etching and two xylographs.

We would like to thank Mr Levasseur for the information he provided about this work.