Old Man Seated on a Trunk

Through much of the 19th century Rome had a regular trade in artists' models. Men and women from the hill villages around the city waited on the Spanish Steps in their country clothes, to be hired by the hour by the foreign painters who lived nearby. In 1826, during his first stay in Italy, Corot painted several such sitters indoors, with no story attached and nothing to dress them up. This old man sits on a wooden trunk in a bare room. He wears a broad dark hat, a white sleeveless coat over a dark jacket, and his hands are folded over a long staff. Corot set the window high on the right and let its light do the modelling, bright on the white coat and the knees, dim along the back wall. The study is small, 32 centimetres high, painted in oil on paper and later mounted on board, and the year 1826 is written in at the lower left.