Eine Italienerin mit Kindern an einem Bach

Johann Koler painted this in 1862, the year he reached Rome. He was the son of Estonian peasants at a time when Estonia had no painters of its own, and he had worked his way through the Saint Petersburg Academy to a stipend that sent him south. So here is Italy as a young northerner saw it, a mother and her children resting by a stream in warm, even light, the kind of sunlit genre scene Rome's foreign artists turned out for a living. Koler would go on to become a leading voice of the Estonian national awakening and its first professional painter. The face he gives the woman is idealised and calm, far closer to the Italian models around him than to anyone back home.