His hard work paid off however when he was accepted into the Salon for the first time in 1840. At this time, the main influences on him were Poussin and the type of work he produced consisted predominantly of mythological subjects or portraiture, at which he was especially adept. Millet was married in 1842 and began taking trips back to Normandy. Also around this time his paintings began to reflect memories of the rural life he had known as a child and his capturing of peasant life was to be characteristic of the rest of his artistic career.

Although he was officially distrusted because of his real or imaginary Socialist leanings, his own attitude towards his chosen theme of peasant life was curiously ambivalent. Being of peasant stock, he tended to look upon farmworkers as narrow-minded and oblivious of beauty, and did not accept the notion that `honest toil' was the secret of happiness. In fact, his success partly stemmed from the fact that, though compared with most of his predecessors and, indeed, his contemporaries, he was a Realist, he presented this reality in an acceptable form, with a religious or idyllic gloss. Nevertheless, he became a symbol to younger artists, to whom he gave help and encouragement. It was he who, on a visit to Le Havre to paint portraits, encouraged Boudin to become an artist, and his work certainly influenced the young Monet, and even more decidedly so Pissaro, who shared similar political inclinations.

Millet continued to paint and enjoy success and although towards the end of his life, when he started using a lighter palette and freer brushstrokes, his work showed some affinities with Impressionism his technique was never really close to theirs. He never painted out-of-doors, and he had only a limited awareness of tonal values, but his draughtsmanship had such a monumental quality that it appealed to artists such as Seurat and van Gogh who was so enthralled by Millet's subject-matter and it's social implications that over a period of three months, from late 1889 to early 1890, while in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh did 21 copies of Millet's works.