In einer römischen Osteria

Carl Bloch was a young Dane living in Rome in 1866 when he painted this tavern scene, and the reason it still stops people is the woman in the middle. Everyone else is busy with the meal, but she has turned and is looking straight out of the picture, right at you, with a cool, level, slightly wary expression, as if you have just walked in and she is deciding what to make of you. That direct gaze was an unusual thing to hand an ordinary tavern girl at the time. The painting was commissioned by Bloch's friend and patron, the merchant Moritz Melchior, who backed him for years, and Melchior worked his own likeness into the group in the background. Bloch loved surfaces, and it shows in the plain crockery and the worn cloth of her dress, painted with the same care he usually saved for his religious pictures.