Seated Young Shepherd

Flandrin painted this in 1834, while living in Rome as a holder of the Prix de Rome, the state prize that sent the best young French painters to Italy for years of study. He was a favorite pupil of Ingres. A naked young man sits at the foot of a tree, head bowed, a staff in his hand the only sign that he is meant to be a shepherd from antiquity. It really began as an academic exercise in the male nude, the model an Italian boy who turns up in other pictures of his, the landscape invented and worked up in the studio. The museum in Lyon, Flandrin's home city, only acquired the canvas in 2012.