Portrait of Ettore Lega

This was painted in the mid-1850s at Modigliana, the hill town in Romagna where Lega had grown up and where he spent several years working almost alone, making portrait after portrait of the people in the house. The sitter is his youngest brother Ettore, about ten years old, set down with the tight clean drawing Lega had learned in Florence from his teacher Luigi Mussini. It is a small canvas, under 40 centimetres high.

Ettore was the only one of the brothers to outlive the painter. Lega died in 1895, Ettore in 1928, and the year after that the portrait turned up at auction in Milan, in a season when the great private holdings of 19th-century Tuscan painting were being broken up and sold off. The collector Lamberto Vitali bought it there and later left his whole collection to Brera. It hangs now in Palazzo Citterio, the wing that opened at the end of 2024.