The Daughter of Jack La Bolina

The girl is Lucia Vecchi, and the title names her father instead. Augusto Vecchi was an officer of the Italian navy who made a second career writing about ships and the sea under the pen name Jack La Bolina, known widely enough in 1888 that a picture could be titled after it. Vittorio Corcos put his daughter in her good clothes, standing in shadow against a lit stretch of the coast near Castiglioncello, below Livorno, where Italian painters had been working out of doors since the 1860s. He was 29 and lately back in Tuscany after years in Paris. The canvas is large for a portrait of a girl, 139 by 105 centimetres, and he signed it at the lower right, V. CORCOS 88.