Portrait de Augustine Fournerie

This portrait from 1840 belongs to the earliest phase of Millet's career, when he was still practicing the academically respectable genre of portraiture to earn a living in Cherbourg and its surroundings. Before his decisive move to Paris and his eventual settlement at Barbizon, Millet worked as a provincial portrait painter, producing likenesses of local bourgeois and professional families. Augustine Fournerie appears to have been a subject from this social milieu. The painting demonstrates that Millet possessed considerable conventional skill — the ability to render fabric, skin tone, and psychological presence within the decorous constraints of French provincial portraiture — long before he abandoned such commissions in favor of peasant subjects. The work is now held at the Musée d'Art moderne de Troyes, a collection particularly rich in nineteenth-century French painting. Portrait practice in this period remained the primary means by which young French painters sustained themselves before achieving Salon recognition or independent patronage. Millet continued painting portraits sporadically throughout the early 1840s, but by mid-decade his attention had shifted irreversibly toward the figure subjects that would make his reputation.

Painted on canvas in the academic manner expected of provincial portrait work, the painting demonstrates controlled handling of tonal modelling in the face and hands, with drapery rendered in smooth, descriptive brushwork. The palette is relatively restrained, with flesh tones carefully observed against a neutral ground.