Study (Young Male Nude Seated Beside the Sea)

Flandrin painted this seated youth around 1836 as a student exercise, sent home from Rome to prove his progress. He had won the Prix de Rome a few years earlier, the state prize that paid a young French artist to live and study in Italy, and he was a devoted pupil of the great classicist Ingres. The picture had a plain purpose: to demonstrate command of the male body, of line and idealized form. A nude youth sits on a rock by the sea, knees drawn up, head bowed, wound into a near-perfect circle. Napoleon III bought it in 1857, and through countless later reproductions on posters and postcards the once-anonymous study became one of the best-known images Flandrin ever made.