Portrait of Prosper Marilhat

In the mid-1830s a group of young painters and writers in Paris lived like a little bohemian colony, and the writer Théophile Gautier later remembered a costume ball they threw, for which each of them painted part of the decor. The boy Chassériau supplied a Diana bathing. Prosper Marilhat painted three palm trees opening over the dome of a mosque.

Marilhat had good reason to paint palms. In 1831 he had sailed as the draughtsman of a scientific expedition led by the Austrian baron Karl von Hügel, through Greece, Syria and Lebanon to Egypt, and the objects on the console beside him point to that journey, an ancient red-figure vase and an Egyptian basket. A small sketchbook is the only hint of his trade. Chassériau painted his friend in 1835 almost entirely in black, with the face and hands as the only light, gave him the canvas, and showed it at his own first Salon, in 1836. Marilhat lost his reason and died in 1847, at 36. The portrait stayed with his family until his brother's descendants gave it to the Louvre in 1906.