A Soldier (study for The Enrollment of the Volunteers of 1792)

In the summers of 1876 and 1877 a Boston painter in his early 30s went to study with Thomas Couture at Villiers-le-Bel, the village north of Paris where the old master had settled and still took pupils. The student was Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, son of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

By 1893 this panel was his. It is a single head in profile, a man with a heavy moustache and an open collar, laid in fast on a dark ground. The title connects it to The Enrollment of the Volunteers of 1792, the huge revolutionary scene Couture began for the French state in 1848 and never finished, and this is one of the many studies he made for its crowd. The museum gives it no date, and its earlier history is uncertain. It may be the study sold in Paris in 1892 from the collection of Ferdinand Barbedienne, the bronze founder.

Longfellow died in 1921, and the panel came to the Museum of Fine Arts two years later with his bequest.