Excavations at Pompeii

When Sain set up his easel at Pompeii, the dig had only recently changed hands. Naples had joined the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861, and the excavations were now run by the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who organised the work systematically and first filled the hollows left by victims' bodies with plaster. Sain signed this canvas with the place and the year, Pompeii 1865. He shows the clearing, a man swinging a pickaxe, a girl kneeling beside a red-painted pillar, broken pottery on the ground, walls still carrying their colour, and Vesuvius above it all with a thin thread of smoke at the summit. Napoleon III bought it with his own funds in 1866, the year it was shown at the Salon, and gave it to the Musée du Luxembourg. From 1920 it spent almost 50 years on deposit at the French parliament, in the Chamber of Deputies.