Madame J.-F. Millet (Pauline-Virginie Ono)

Millet married Pauline-Virginie Ono in Cherbourg in November 1841, and this is the portrait he painted of her that year. She is shown close up against a plain grey ground, in a white bonnet tied under the chin, a small gold earring showing beside her smooth dark hair. Millet kept the picture all his life. It stayed with his second wife, Catherine Lemaire, and when her estate was sold in Paris in 1894 it went for 300 francs. Two years later Edgar Degas bought it. In his last decades Degas spent heavily on works by painters he admired, Ingres and Delacroix above all, and he kept this portrait until his death in 1917. His collection was auctioned at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in March 1918, days after German long-range guns had begun dropping shells on the city. The portrait fetched 5,700 francs, nearly 20 times its price of 1894, and it came to Boston in 1944.