Portrait of the Borri Stampa Family

The woman in black did not like this picture. Teresa Borri Stampa, lately widowed, sits outdoors with her mother Marianna, her brother Giuseppe and her small son Stefano. When she saw the finished canvas she complained about the way her body had been painted, and she objected to the funerary urn carrying her husband's profile on the column behind her. Hayez painted the urn out and opened up the landscape where it had been, and the canvas then stayed in his studio for about 30 years. In 1837 Teresa married again, to Alessandro Manzoni, whose novel The Betrothed was by then the book every literate Italian had read, and Hayez painted her a second time in 1849. Both portraits came to the Brera in 1900.