Saint Sebastian

Dominique Moreau-Nélaton, an officer cadet in the French infantry, died on 11 May 1918, in the last year of the First World War. His father, Étienne, was a painter and collector who had written a history of Corot's work, and in 1919 he gave a small group of pictures to the French state in his son's memory. This canvas was one of them. It is modest, about half a metre tall, and shows the young saint tied to a tree, his arms raised over his head. The Louvre dates it only loosely, somewhere between 1850 and 1875. The red stamp in the lower right corner comes from the sale of Corot's studio after his death, so the picture was still with him at the end. It now hangs in the Louvre room given over to Moreau-Nélaton's Corots.