A Woman Adjusting Her Stocking

A Woman Adjusting Her Stocking, painted in 1848 on panel and held at the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, is an unusual work in Millet's output — a genre scene of intimate female privacy that differs from both his monumental rural labour subjects and his portraiture. The depiction of a woman in an unguarded private moment, adjusting her clothing, participates in the tradition of intimate genre scenes familiar from seventeenth-century Dutch painting and developed by French genre painters in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The 1848 date makes this a transitional work, produced in the year of Millet's move to Barbizon. The Burrell Collection in Glasgow, assembled by the shipping magnate William Burrell, holds one of the most eclectic and important art collections in Scotland.

Oil on panel with the close-in, intimate handling appropriate to a small-scale scene of domestic privacy. The restricted spatial setting — possibly an interior — focuses attention on the figure's specific gesture and the momentary, unconsidered nature of the action.