The Failed Student

Nobody knows the year. The Italian state catalogue gives only a limit for this canvas, before 1870, with no lower bound at all, and the 1870 that circulates elsewhere is that same limit repeated as though it were the date of painting. It belongs somewhere in Cammarano's Neapolitan years of ordinary modern subjects, when a young man who had failed his examinations was a fit thing to paint at life size.

He sits in a rush chair in a student's room, arms folded, his top hat still on his head. Cammarano signed it in the lower left corner. The picture came into the collection through the Rome sale of the antiquary Augusto Iandolo in May 1913 and was being listed in the Florence guidebooks by 1934. It hangs in the modern gallery on the second floor of Palazzo Pitti, among the nineteenth-century Neapolitan and Tuscan rooms.