Jean-François Millet

James Staats Forbes, London; probably acquired in Brussels in 1888, until his death, 1904

Private collection, United Kingdom

J. Cartwright, Jean-François Millet, His Life and Letters, London and New York, 1896, p. 91.

J. Cartwright, "The Drawings of Jean-François Millet in the Collection of the late Mr. James Staats Forbes, Part IV" Burlington Magazine, vol. 6, July 1905, p. 362, illustrated

L. Lepoittevin, Jean-François Millet: Portraitiste, Paris, 1971, pp. LII-LIII, no. 103, illustrated

Drawn circa 1847-49.

Portrait of a Man, said to be Léopold Desbrosses belongs to a small group of drawings depicting fellow artists and close friends that Millet created in 1847-49. Millet was living in Paris during the troubled days around the Revolution of 1848, and these large, closely observed portraits -- which include the painters Diaz and Bodmer and the sculptor Barye, as well as a self-portrait now in the Cabinet des dessins of the Louvre -- provide one of the few documents for Millet's life and contacts before his move to Barbizon.

The sitter in Portrait of a Man was first identified as 'the critic Desbrosses' by Julia Cartwright, a writer and friend of the collector J. Staats Forbes who owned the drawing in the late nineteenth-century. The individual represented here may well have been Léopold Desbrosses (1821-1906), a landscape painter who debuted at the Salon of 1848, and who would probably have been known to Millet through their shared training in the studio of Paul Delaroche.

Portrait of a Man was acquired in Brussels together with at least two other Millet portrait drawings by James Staats Forbes, a prominent British industrialist who amassed an extraordinary collection of Barbizon and Hague School paintings and drawings during the late nineteenth-century.