1840
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Monsieur Martin is a 1840 unspecified by Jean François Millet, a Realism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
Monsieur Martin is a portrait of a man with a beard and simple clothing. He looks straightforward, with a calm face. The background is plain, which makes him stand out. The artist used this simple setting to focus on the man's expression, and it's interesting that the subject is a middle-class worker, not a noble or wealthy person. To learn more about similar portraits, look up the technique of sfumato.
Millet and the other members of the Realist movement were renowned for not only producing realistic images, but for typically injecting their pictures with political, spiritual, or social messages. Sensitive to the human psyche and the rise of the bourgeoisie, Millet used a simple, almost monochromatic background to focus attention on the face of Monsieur Martin, a middle-class veterinarian and meat inspector. Indeed, Martin's beard, hair style, clothing, even his common French name, and the fact that he could afford portraits of himself and his wife (now lost) convey that he belonged to the…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jean-François Millet (French pronunciation: ; 4 October 1814 – 20 January 1875) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France.
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