Portrait of Louise-Antoinette Feuardent

The half-length Portrait of Louise-Antoinette Feuardent is a work of great sobriety and restraint, but also subtle allure. With her head tilted forward and arms folded at her waist so that her ring finger is accentuated, the sitter’s pose is, for a bourgeois woman of the period, fittingly demure, but her outward gaze is direct and frank, riveting the viewer’s attention. Her pale face, neck, and hand are firmly modeled, and the contours of her silhouette are precisely defined. The strong blacks and whites of her dress stand out starkly against the neutral mid-tones of the plain, nondescript background, which has been thinly brushed in cool grey over a brownish preparatory layer that provides just a hint of warmth. In a picture devoid of extraneous detail, the artist has allowed himself a single painterly flourish near the center of the composition: the sitter’s modest lace collar, painted loosely and economically in liquid, semitransparent strokes of white. At lower left, we read in bold, black capitals: MILLET.

Depicting the young wife of Millet’s close friend Felix-Bienaimé Feuardent (1819–1907), the Portrait of Louis-Antoinette Feuardent is a testament to one of the defining relationships of the artist’s life and to his artistic ambitions near the outset of his career, when he was intent on establishing himself as the leading portraitist in Cherbourg. It was only years later that Millet settled in Barbizon on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau and began forging his lasting reputation as France’s great painter of peasant subjects, of which the Getty Museum’s Man with a Hoe is an iconic example.

Born into a respectable and devout farming family in 1814, Millet grew up in the hamlet of Gruchy in the commune of Gréville, some 15 kilometers from the port city of Cherbourg on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy. Cherbourg would be the crucial staging ground for Millet’s career, and it was there that his professional formation began as he neared his twentieth year. After receiving some initial instruction from the local painter Bon Dumoucel (1807–1846), which was cut short by Millet’s father’s death in November 1835,¹ the artist returned to Cherbourg early in 1836 to continue his studies with the history painter and portraitist Lucien-Théophile-Ange-Sosthène Langlois de Chevreville (1802–1845), a former pupil of Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835) who had recently set up a teaching studio.² The course of study that Langlois prescribed largely involved copy exercises in the Musée Thomas Henry, which had been inaugurated just the year before and which boasted a substantial and, for the time, impressively encyclopedic collection of European painting.³ Millet fast became Langlois’s protégé, and in August 1836 Langlois addressed a petition to the municipal council requesting a bursary that would enable the young artist to move to Paris, enroll in one of the leading ateliers, and pursue his ambitions as a history painter.⁴ Some of Millet’s student work was displayed before the council, and Langlois’s petition was granted.⁵ The Journal de Cherbourg endorsed the decision, describing Millet as “a prodigious talent [….] who promises to become a celebrity one day, maybe even a great man” who could do honor to Cherbourg and to France.⁶ 1836 ended on a high note as one of Millet’s large-format copy drawings was displayed in the Musée Henry, prompting more encouragement from the press.⁷ Millet was set to leave the provinces with Cherbourg’s full backing and the considerable weight of expectation that this entailed.

Soon after arriving in Paris in January 1837, Millet entered the studio of Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), a painter of historical dramas who was then at the height of his fame, and for the next two years the young artist would devote himself to academic exercises that were designed to prepare students for the annual Prix de Rome competitions, a course of study that was facilitated by renewed grants from the municipal council of Cherbourg and also the general council of the Manche department. But after two failed attempts at the Prix de Rome and the councils’ decision, toward the end of 1839, not to renew Millet’s funding, the 25-year-old artist was at a crossroads and under mounting financial pressure. He left Delaroche’s studio, momentarily set aside his ambitions as a history painter, and focused his attention on the annual state-sponsored Salon.

Tellingly, the works he submitted to the 1840 exhibition were both portraits. One of these, a portrait of Louis-Alexandre Marolle (b. ca. 1820), a close artist friend, was rejected by the jury,⁸ but the other, Portrait de M. L. F…, was accepted ― his first acceptance to date.⁹ Millet’s choice to submit portraits was strategic and unsurprising. Bourgeois portraiture was a burgeoning genre in this period, and it was certainly one of the more commercially viable for an emerging artist of little means. Millet, moreover, had been practicing the genre for a few years by then, portraying various family members and friends on return visits to Normandy.¹⁰ Competition was nevertheless intense. Millet’s Portrait de M. L. F… was one of more than four hundred portraits in the 1840 Salon,¹¹ and it passed unnoticed in the Parisian newspapers.

The mere fact of having a work accepted in the Salon, however, was an encouraging sign for Millet, and he quickly sought to parlay his new Parisian credentials into provincial success.¹² After the Salon he returned to Cherbourg with the intent of establishing a portrait practice there, where he was already a figure of some public interest. Like other local and itinerant portraitists, Millet took advantage of the Musée Henry to advertise his talent. As the Journal de Cherbourg reported on September 13, 1840:

Tomorrow, Sunday, a portrait painted by M. Millet will be exhibited in the vestibule of the Musée Henry. One will recognize in this canvas by our compatriot the realization of the happy dispositions that his beginnings intimated. Boldness and breadth of touch, energy of tone, truth and strength in expression, pleasing harmony of the whole, all this can be found in this portrait, which deserves in all respects the attention of connoisseurs. ¹³

The following months were highly productive ones for Millet, as he continued to exhibit new portraits at regular intervals in the museum.¹⁴ Unfortunately we cannot identify these paintings, since the local press did not name the sitters or describe the works in any detail, but a stern and piercing self-portrait gives us a good idea of the artist’s intensity and resolve during this period (fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875), Self-Portrait, 1841. Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm. Cherbourg–en-Cotentin, Musée Thomas Henry.

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Millet’s visibility in Cherbourg was amplified by his friend Felix-Bienaimé Feuardent, who displayed the artist’s portraits in his shop on at least two occasions in the latter part of 1840. Indeed, it was through Feuardent that Millet announced that he was open for business in Cherbourg. As the notice ran in the Journal de Cherbourg on September 10:

M. Millet, the young painter whose happy dispositions the elective assemblies of the Manche have so often been pleased to encourage, is currently in Cherbourg; he intends to take the opportunity to make some portraits. One of his works in this genre, very remarkable in both its execution and resemblance, is on display with M. Feuardent, bookseller, rue de l’Hôpital.¹⁵

Feuardent was not just a sitter for one of Millet’s portraits around this time (fig. 2); he clearly was playing an active role in promoting his friend’s career, a fact that has not been properly acknowledged.

Fig. 2. Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875), Portrait of Félix-Bienaimé Feuardent, c. 1841. Oil on canvas, 73.3 x 60.6 cm (28 7/8 x 23 7/8 in.). Private collection (sold Sotheby’s, New York, 19th Century European Painting, Apr. 24, 2002, no. 31).

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If Millet was a young man on the rise in Cherbourg in the second half of 1840, so too was Feuardent. It is not clear when the two met, but later biographers have claimed that their friendship dated to Millet’s earliest days in Cherbourg in the mid-1830s, when a teenage Feuardent was a commis, or clerk, for the bookseller and merchant Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas Lecouflet (1787–1844)¹⁶ — the story being that the well-read Millet’s penchant for books brought them together.¹⁷ But when Millet returned to Cherbourg in the late summer of 1840, Feuardent was no longer a mere clerk. In June of that year he received his official brevet, or license, as a libraire,¹⁸ and soon afterward he established his own bookshop on the rue de l’Hôpital. Over the course of the summer and fall, Feuardent worked hard to establish, advertise, and grow his business. He offered a wide range of books, particularly those of a serious literary and historical nature, as well as sheet music, prints, and a range of other articles and fancy goods.¹⁹ At the end of September unfortunately, just a couple months after opening, disaster struck when a fire ravaged Feuardent’s store in the middle of the night, destroying much of the more valuable inventory. The press reported that the frantic young man, who lived above the shop, braved the smoke and flames to save what books he could; adding insult to injury, a significant sum of money was stolen from the premises during the commotion.²⁰ Three weeks later, however, Feuardent had already made the necessary repairs, replenished some of his stock (thanks to a shipment from Paris that was still en route when the fire broke out), and reopened for business. Highly impressed, the Journal de Cherbourg made a point of encouraging the townsfolk to patronize Feuardent and extolling him as a model of intelligence, hard work, and family devotion.²¹ Things had turned around quickly for the young entrepreneur, and by the end of the year he had his sights set on expansion as he finalized plans to add a reading room featuring a large selection of Parisian and provincial newspapers.²²

This was a momentous time in Feuardent’s personal life too. It is unclear when he met Louise-Antoinette Casini (1818–1907) – the subject of the Getty portrait – but by the end of 1840 they were intimately involved. Probably sometime in November or December they conceived their first child, Louis-Gaston, who would be born on August 20, 1841.²³ On February 3, 1841, when Casini was about two months pregnant, she and Feuardent were married, with Millet serving as one of the signing witnesses on the civil acte de mariage.²⁴ Twenty-two at the time, Casini was less than a year older than Feuardent.²⁵ She too was a native of Cherbourg, having been born in 1818 to a French mother, Louise-Marie-Rosalie Lecourt (1790–1830), and to an Italian father originally from Siena, Antoine-Marie Casini (1787–1847), who eventually rose to the position of “maître sculpteur à la Marine,”²⁶ which is to say, the master of the sculpture studio at the Cherbourg arsenal, or navy yard.

Casini had had some hard experiences by the time of her marriage to Feuardent. Her first husband, Michel Hebert (b. 1818), whom she had married in 1837, died suddenly on January 4, 1840, at age 21.²⁷ This loss was quickly followed less than a month later by the death of their six-month-old daughter, Louise-Victorine.²⁸ Louise-Antoinette was left with one surviving child, Marie-Josephine-Antoinette Hebert, who was not yet two years old.²⁹ For a young widow and mother in her position, finding a new husband, both for security and support, must have been critical. The enterprising and independent Feuardent, already a figure of public sympathy and admiration, would certainly have seemed an eligible and attractive prospect.

It is generally assumed that Millet’s Portrait of Louise-Antoinette Feuardent was occasioned by the sitter’s 1841 marriage, and that it is the spousal pendant to Millet’s portrait of Felix-Bienaimé Feuardent (fig. 2). Caution should be exercised here, however, since the two sitters face the same direction in their portraits, suggesting that they were not strictly conceived as pendants (whose sitters would face each other on the wall) but rather were painted independently on separate occasions.

With regard to the dating of the Getty portrait, it is not impossible that Millet executed it in the weeks immediately following the Feuardent wedding (i.e., late February-early March 1841), but this seems unlikely since it was at exactly this time that Millet was busying himself with an important commission he had just received from the municipal authorities of Cherbourg to paint a posthumous portrait of Paul-Honoré Javain (1770–1841), the recently deceased former mayor. This episode ended in a debacle in March when the portrait was judged to be a poor likeness and the council withheld payment, prompting a heated exchange with the artist (in his defense, Millet had never met Javain and had been supplied with only a miniature portrait for reference).³⁰ A disgruntled Millet decamped and was back in Paris by early April.

Millet’s next opportunity for painting Mme Feuardent would have presented itself only months later when he returned to Cherbourg, this time for his own marriage on November 16, 1841 to Pauline-Virginie Ono (1821–1844), the daughter of a local tailor, Pierre-Armand Ono, called Biot (1800–1875), who happened to be close to Felix-Bienaimé Feuardent and had served as witness, along with Millet, to Feuardent’s marriage.³¹ During this Cherbourg sojourn, which lasted until early 1842 when Millet and his wife left for Paris, the painter is known to have busied himself with portraits,³² and the Portrait of Louise-Antoinette Feuardent might easily belong to this group, which is otherwise dominated by paintings of his new in-laws. Indeed, there are obvious similarities, both in style and pose, between the Getty painting and a portrait of Pauline Ono that Millet is thought to have produced around the time of his marriage (fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875), Pauline Ono in Blue, 1841-1842. Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm. Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, Musée Thomas Henry.

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Whatever the precise date of its execution in 1841, the Portrait of Louise-Antoinette Feuardent ranks among the strongest of Millet’s early Cherbourg period. It exemplifies the bold simplicity and cultivated lack of pretension that characterizes much post-revolutionary French portraiture, and attests to the fact that the influence of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and his school – of which Langlois, as a student of Gros, was a third-generation representative – was still strong in the middle of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the portrait reflects contemporary fashion, tinged as it is with romantic melancholy in the sitter’s wan, pallid mien and slightly mournful expression, which gains in resonance with the knowledge of Mme Feuardent’s recent life experiences. And while the portrait was calculated in its modesty and reserve to appeal to the conservative tastes and gender norms of the provincial bourgeoisie, it also brings to bear the painterly lessons that Millet had learned in Paris and that were to distinguish his brand of portraiture from the more routine and high-volume productions of the miniaturists and daguerreotypists who were also seeking business in Cherbourg in the late 1830s and early 1840s.

Scholars have been right to detect a certain Spanish flavor in Millet’s early Cherbourg work, for his time in Paris had coincided with the opening, in January 1838, of King Louis-Philippe’s Galerie espagnole in the Louvre, a major event in the artistic life of Paris and in Millet’s own education. He wasted little time in visiting this large collection of Spanish painting and writing enthusiastically about it to friends in Cherbourg.³³ Works by and attributed to Francisco de Zurbarán dominated the display, and his full-length female figures in particular commanded attention.³⁴ Zurbarán’s female saints also figured prominently in top-tier Parisian collections like that of Marshal Soult (1769–1851), and one might recognize a distant template for the bodily attitude, the tilt of the head, and the forthright gaze of Millet’s Mme Feuardent in paintings like Zurbarán’s Saint Casilda or Saint Apollonia (figs. 4-5), both of which were then in Soult’s collection.³⁵ Contemporary critics highlighted the mixture of saintliness and allure in Zurbarán’s female figures,³⁶ and Millet may very well have sought to nuance his portrait of his friend’s wife in a similar way.

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After the trial of her first marriage, Louise-Antoinette Casini was far more fortunate in her second, which proved both enduring and fruitful, though not without its own difficult losses. From 1841 through 1857, she gave birth to 11 children, meaning that she was routinely pregnant from the time she was 22 until the time she was 38 years old.³⁷ As an indicator of the prevalence of child mortality during this period, she and her husband lost four of these children when they were still babies or toddlers. Their first two, Louis-Gaston (b.1841) and Louise-Pauline (b. 1842), died within weeks of each other in February 1843,³⁸ and these were followed the following decade by the deaths of Cécile-Eugénie (b. 1851) in 1852³⁹ and Amélie-Cécile (b. 1853) in 1855.⁴⁰ Mme Feuardent’s fortitude must have been remarkable, however, as she continued to dedicate herself to building her family. Her remaining children proved to be remarkably long-lived, as did she herself.⁴¹

While Mme Feuardent committed herself to motherhood, M. Feuardent worked steadily to support his family and advance his career. If in the 1840s he established himself as a respected libraire, his attention shifted in the 1850s to printing, publishing, and scholarly pursuits. He received his brevet as imprimeur, or printer, in December 1853,⁴² just before taking over the printing and editorship of the Journal de Cherbourg, the very newspaper that been so supportive of him and Millet earlier in their careers.⁴³ He immediately used the newspaper to advertise the first scholarly book he published in 1854: Études géographiques et historiques sur le département de la Manche, by the late Charles de Gerville (1769–1853), a noted naturalist, archeologist, and historian who was one of the founders of the Société des Antiquaires de Normandie.⁴⁴ Gerville had been instrumental in fostering Feuardent’s antiquarian interests,⁴⁵ and when Gerville died he bequeathed his exceptional collection of ancient coins and medals to Feuardent.⁴⁶ It was upon the basis of this windfall that Feuardent was able to launch his own career as a numismatist. He orchestrated the auction of Gerville’s collection in Paris in 1854⁴⁷ and soon began publishing scholarly notices, particularly in the Revue numismatique.⁴⁸ Through this activity he came into contact with the leading Parisian numismatist Claude-Camille Rollin (1813–1883),⁴⁹ with whom he eventually went into business after relocating to Paris in 1858 with his family, not long after the birth of his youngest child.⁵⁰ With quarters near Bibliothèque nationale on the Rue Vivienne (Rollin’s longstanding address), the firm of MM. Rollin & Feuardent was the leader in its field. They published the Revue numismatique (which Rollin had helped launch in 1836), regularly served as authenticating experts in auctions of coins and medals, and generally dominated the Paris trade, cultivating many collectors over the years. Feuardent’s reputation, according to a 1907 obituary, was that of “an amiable, obliging, admirably informed scholar, to whom museums and libraries all over the world owe a part of their wealth and who exercised a fruitful influence on an ever-expanding group of collectors.”⁵¹ What this obituary omits is the poignant and suggestive fact that M. Feuardent died scarcely more than three weeks after his wife of 66 years.⁵² Though we know much less about Mme Feuardent than her husband, who enjoyed the privilege of a public career, one suspects that their union was a profound one.

Even after their career paths led them in different directions, Millet, Feuardent, and their spouses were important fixtures in each others’ lives. Feuardent continued exhibiting Millet’s work in his shop,⁵³ even after the Javain affair had reportedly soured Millet’s relationship with the Cherbourg city councillors and other local notables in 1841.⁵⁴ In November 1842 during a return visit from Paris, Millet acted as witness to the birth of the Feuardents’ second child, Louise-Pauline,⁵⁵ and on subsequent trips he would again portray members of the Feuardent family. When Millet returned to Cherbourg in 1844 following the untimely death of Pauline Ono, he enlisted Antoinette Hebert, the one surviving child from Mme Feuardent’s first marriage, to pose for the little girl kneeling before a mirror in one of the most memorable works executed in his so-called “manière fleurie,” or florid manner, which was characterized by rich coloration and roughly textured brushwork―a far cry from the austerity of his earlier portraits (fig. 6).⁵⁶

Fig. 6. Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875), Antoinette Hebert Looking in the Mirror, c. 1844. Oil on canvas, 101.1 x 81.3 cm. Private collection.

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1844 would be the last year that Millet painted portraits in Cherbourg. At some point after Pauline Ono’s death he started a relationship with Catherine Lemaire (1827–1894), a domestic servant 13 years his junior, and possibly to keep the knowledge of this liaison from his family (and avoid difficult encounters with the Ono family), Millet moved to Le Havre in 1845, plied his trade as a portraitist there for several months, and then moved with Lemaire to Paris, where they soon started a family.⁵⁷ Millet would keep his distance from Normandy for several years, returning only upon his mother’s death in the spring of 1853. Later that year he and Lemaire were finally married, and it was only then that Millet entertained a longer trip back to his native region with his new family. He, Catherine, and their four children spent the whole summer of 1854 in Normandy,⁵⁸ an occasion commemorated by a family photograph taken by none other than Feuardent himself, who had become something of an amateur photographer in the intervening years (fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Félix-Bienaimé Feuardent (French, 1819–1907), The Painter Jean-François Millet and His Family, 1854. Daguerreotype, 11.8 x 8.7 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, PHO1984-100

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Contacts between Millet and Feuardent must only have increased once Feuardent established himself and his family in Paris in the late 1850s. Millet, living just a short train trip away in Barbizon, made regular forays into the capital, and he must have seen the Feuardents often. Feuardent obliged Millet by sending him important publications,⁵⁹ sourcing photographic and other reproductions for him,⁶⁰ and also collecting his work,⁶¹ while Millet confided in Feuardent about developments in his career.⁶² They also had new friends in common. It was likely Millet who introduced the famous Barbizon landscape painter Théodore Rousseau to Feuardent, and it is almost certain that Feuardent was the principal source for Rousseau’s important collection of ancient coins and medals,⁶³ which was eventually dispersed at the artist’s estate sale – a sale for which MM. Rollin & Feuardent predictably served as experts.⁶⁴ Feuardent’s relationship with Rousseau was such that Millet wrote to him immediately upon Rousseau’s death in 1867,⁶⁵ and Millet subsequently felt compelled to make his excuses to Mme Feuardent when he was unable, on account of one of his debilitating migraines, to attend the funeral of Mme Rousseau in 1869.⁶⁶

This wasn’t the only time that Millet showed sensitivity to Mme Feuardent’s feelings. The artist was keen on distancing himself from any association with radical leftist politics, and especially with the Paris Commune uprising in the spring of 1871, during which time he was nominated, without his consent, to the revolutionary Fédération des artistes de Paris. Millet made a point of writing to Feuardent about this on May 10, 1871: “Mme Feuardent must have known that I did not accept with too much enthusiasm my famous nomination by the artists of the Commune. My response must have been inserted into several newspapers.”⁶⁷ Millet may have been particularly mindful of her opinion at this moment since he and his family had recently found refuge, after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, in the Feuardents’ home in Cherbourg (Feuardent was in London at the time).⁶⁸ The two families, moreover, were about to be bound even more tightly with the marriage, in Cherbourg on September 16, 1871, of Millet’s eldest daughter Marie-Rosalie (1846-1896) to the Feuardents’ son Léon-Félix (1849–1931), who was on his way to becoming a respected numismatist himself.⁶⁹ Millet had not many years left at this point, but he was fortunate to live long enough to see the birth of his first grandchild, Antoine Feuardent, in 1872.⁷⁰

After Millet’s death in 1875, Feuardent would be a valuable source of biographical information for the art historian and critic Paul Mantz (1821–1895), who had taken on the task of completing and editing the late Alfred Sensier’s unfinished Millet biography.⁷¹ That publication, however, obscures the centrality of Feuardent and his family in Millet’s life, treats Millet’s activities in Cherbourg rather cursorily, and foregrounds Sensier’s own personal and business relationship with Millet, a relationship that dated only from 1847. Felix-Bienaimé Feuardent is introduced as a “commis de librairie” and little else is subsequently said about him or Louise-Antoinette Feuardent, apart from a few passing mentions and citations of correspondence.⁷² Sensier’s description of Feuardent was mistranslated as “clerk of a library” in the 1881 English edition of his biography,⁷³ and many subsequent sources have perpetuated this error.⁷⁴ It will have become clear that Feuardent was a far more significant figure than this characterization would suggest, and he and his wife – as well as Millet’s striking portraits of them – demand closer attention than they have generally been afforded.

• Scott C. Allan
  September 2020