Monsieur Martin

This early portrait of a bearded sitter in a dark coat dates from 1840, when Millet, recently arrived in Paris from the Normandy countryside, was still earning his living as a portraitist. The sober, carefully modeled head shows the young painter working within the tradition of Dutch and French portraiture he had studied, before the move to Barbizon and the peasant subjects that would make him famous. It is a revealing glimpse of the formative decade of the artist who became the great pictorial chronicler of rural labor in nineteenth-century France.