Vittorio Matteo Corcos

In 1896 a young woman sat for a portrait that would outlast everything else its painter made. Vittorio Matteo Corcos called it Sogni, or Dreams: a fashionable girl in a straw hat perched on a bench, yellow-bound French novels beside her, staring straight out at the viewer with a cool, faintly bored directness. The sitter was Elena Vecchi, the daughter of a writer friend, and the picture unsettled its first audience in Florence with exactly that modern self-possession.

Corcos was born in 1859 into a Jewish family in the port city of Livorno, trained in Florence and Naples, then spent years in Paris, where the dealer Goupil sold his elegant society pieces. Back in Italy he became the portraitist the fashionable world wanted, painting writers, composers and aristocrats, among them the poet Giosuè Carducci and the composer Pietro Mascagni.

He went on working through the changed world after the First World War, his polished style increasingly out of season, and died in Florence in 1933. Sogni still hangs in Rome's national gallery of modern art.