Portrait of Mister le Courtois, the Artist’s Brother-in-Law

This 1844 portrait of Monsieur le Courtois — identified as the artist's brother-in-law — represents a personal commission within Millet's sustained portrait-painting practice of the early to mid-1840s. Family portraits occupy a particular category within portraiture: obligatory, affectionate, often executed with greater freedom than formal commissions. Now at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the painting documents Millet's extended family connection and his ability to render male character with directness and psychological penetration. By 1844, Millet was twenty-nine, working between Cherbourg and Paris, already dissatisfied with portrait painting as a career but still dependent on commissions. The Städel's holding of this canvas reflects the broad European dispersal of Millet's early work — much of it through sales, gifts, and the trajectories of private collections across the nineteenth century. Le Courtois appears to have been a middle-class professional; his dress and bearing suggest a solid bourgeois position, and Millet renders him with characteristic directness rather than flattery.

Executed in oil on canvas, the portrait follows the restrained conventions of French bourgeois male portraiture, with careful modelling of the face and a relatively dark, neutral background. Millet's handling is competent and direct, less concerned with flattery than with character.