At first he spent all his time in the Louvre, which revealed to him what the little provincial museum of Cherbourg had but faintly suggested.  Before long, however, he entered the studio of Paul Delaroche, who was the popular master of the time.  There he won the sobriquet of the “man of the woods,” from a savage taciturnity which was his defence in the midst of the atelier jokes.  He had come to work, and to work he addressed himself, with but little encouragement from master or comrades.  Strong as a young Hercules, with a dignity which never forsook him, his studies won at least the success of attention.  When a favorite pupil of the master remonstrated that his men and women were hewed from stone, Millet replied tranquilly, “I came here because there are Greek statues and living men and women to study from, not to please you or any one.  Do I preoccupy myself with your figures made of honey and butter?”

Delaroche, won by the strength of the man, at length unbent, and showed him such favor as a commonplace mind could accord to native superiority.  He advised him to compete for the Prix de Rome, warning him, however, that whatever might be the merit of his work, he could not take it that year, as it was arranged that another, approaching the limit of age, must have it.  This revolted the simple nature of Millet, who refused to compete, and left the school.

A return to Cherbourg, where he married his first wife, who died at the end of two years; another sojourn in Paris, and a visit home of some duration; a number of portraits and pictures painted in Cherbourg and Havre, in which his talent was slowly asserting itself, brings us to 1845, when he remarried.  Returning to Paris with his wife, he remained there until 1849, when he went to Barbizon “for a time,” which was prolonged to twenty-seven years.

In all the years preceding his final return to the country, Millet was apparently undecided as to the definite character of his work.  Out of place in a city, more or less influenced by his comrades in art, and forced to follow in a degree the dictation of necessity in the choice of subject, as his brush was his only resource and his family constantly increasing, his work of this period is always tentative.  In painting it is luscious in color and firmly drawn and modelled, but it lacks the perception of truth which, when once released from the bondage of the city, began to manifest itself in his work.  The first indication of the future Millet is in a picture in the Salon of 1848, “The Winnower,” which has, in subject at least, much the character of the work which followed his establishment at Barbizon.  For the rest, although the world is richer in beautiful pictures of charmingly painted nymphs, and of rustic scenes not altogether devoid of a certain artificiality, and in at least one masterly mythological picture of Oedipus rescued from the tree, through Millet’s activity in these years, yet his work, had it continued on this plane, would have lacked the high significance which the next twenty-five years were to show.