Editing Jean-François Millet (section)

===Paris===
[[Image:Jean-François Millet (II) 005.jpg|thumb|''Woman Baking Bread'', 1854. [[Kröller-Müller Museum]], [[Otterlo]].]]

After his first painting, a portrait, was accepted at the Salon of 1840, Millet returned to Cherbourg to begin a career as a [[portrait painter]].<ref name="Pollock_21"/> The following year he married Pauline-Virginie Ono, and they moved to [[Paris]]. After rejections at the Salon of 1843 and Pauline's death by [[Tuberculosis|consumption]] in April 1844, Millet returned again to Cherbourg.<ref name="Pollock_21"/> In 1845, Millet moved to [[Le Havre]] with Catherine Lemaire, whom he married in a civil ceremony in 1853; they had nine children and remained together for the rest of Millet's life.<ref>Murphy, p.21.</ref> In Le Havre he painted portraits and small genre pieces for several months, before moving back to Paris.

It was in Paris in the middle 1840s that Millet befriended [[Constant Troyon]], [[Narcisse Diaz]], [[Charles Jacque]], and [[Théodore Rousseau]], artists who, like Millet, became associated with the Barbizon school; [[Honoré Daumier]], whose figure draftsmanship influenced Millet's subsequent rendering of peasant subjects; and [[:fr:Alfred Sensier]], a government bureaucrat who became a lifelong supporter and eventually the artist's biographer.<ref>Champa, p.183.</ref> In 1847, his first Salon success came with the exhibition of a painting ''Oedipus Taken down from the Tree'', and in 1848, his ''Winnower'' was bought by the government.<ref name="Pollock_22">Pollock, p. 22.</ref>

''The Captivity of the Jews in Babylon'', Millet's most ambitious work at the time, was unveiled at the Salon of 1848, but was scorned by art critics and the public alike. The painting eventually disappeared shortly thereafter, leading historians to believe that Millet destroyed it. In 1984, scientists at the [[Museum of Fine Arts, Boston|Museum of Fine Arts in Boston]] x-rayed Millet's 1870 painting ''The Young Shepherdess'' looking for minor changes, and discovered that it was painted over ''Captivity''. It is now believed that Millet reused the canvas when materials were in short supply during the [[Franco-Prussian War]].