Louis Robert as a child

Louis Robert was about two years old when Corot painted him, in 1843 or 1844. His father, François-Parfait Robert, was a magistrate at Mantes on the Seine and a close friend of the painter. The boy wears what small boys of prosperous families wore at the time, a dress, here a blue one, with a white collar tied at the throat and a frilled bonnet. French boys were usually kept in dresses until they were about five, so nothing in this would have looked odd to his parents. He holds a toy whip and looks straight out at us. The portrait is small, 27 by 22 centimetres, and it carries the stamp of Ange Ottoz, a Paris colour merchant who sold prepared canvases and paints to artists. Louis died in 1877, still in his thirties.