Portrait of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour

Cavour died in Turin on 6 June 1861, at 50, less than three months after the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed and he became its first prime minister. A portrait was commissioned within months of the funeral, but Hayez did not paint it until 1864, and by then the only thing he had to work from was a plaster cast taken from Cavour's face after death, which he kept in his studio. A cast gives you the shape of a head and nothing more, so the colouring, the set of the shoulders and the expression were all reconstruction. Critics at the time found the picture conventional, and blamed that distance, since Hayez had never sat across from the man he was painting.