Portrait of a Man

In 1845 Jean-François Millet was a portrait painter who needed the work. The Gleaners and the peasants bent over the fields, the pictures his name now belongs to, were still years off. He did not settle at Barbizon and turn to farm labour until 1849. Before that he moved between Cherbourg, Le Havre and Paris, taking commissions like this one to pay his way, and for a while turned out small charming pieces his friends called his flowery manner. Here he keeps it plain. A man in dark clothes against a dark ground, the collar and the face doing all the work, set down by someone who grew up among Normandy farmers and always looked hardest at ordinary people.