Portrait de Pauline Ono en robe du matin

Before Millet became the painter of stooped peasants and gleaners, he was a young portraitist from the Cherbourg coast, and this is his first wife, Pauline-Virginie Ono, a tailor's daughter he had married in 1841. He painted her around 1843 in a loose morning dress. Within months she was dying of tuberculosis, and she did not live past April 1844, still in her twenties. The refinement of the clothing sits against how drawn and tired she already looks. Millet's own work had just been rejected by the Paris Salon that same year. He left the coast, remarried, and turned toward the rural labour he is remembered for. The portrait stayed in Cherbourg, where it entered the local museum in 1915.