Portrait of Augustine Fournerie

In 1840 Jean-François Millet was 26 and almost unknown, making his living the way many young painters did, by taking portrait commissions. It was the year he first had a work accepted at the Paris Salon, and that too was a portrait. All of this came well before the pictures that would make his name, the hushed scenes of peasants at work like "The Gleaners" and "The Angelus." Here he paints a local woman, Augustine Fournerie, born Doré, in a plain and direct way, with none of the rural subject matter he later became known for. The small canvas eventually passed to the French industrialist and collector Pierre Lévy, who gathered a large group of modern French art and gave it to the city of Troyes, where the portrait hangs today.