The Man in Armor

In the lower left corner of this canvas Corot wrote a dedication: to my pupil and friend Lavieille. Eugène Lavieille had joined his studio in 1841 and became a landscape painter in his own right, known above all for night scenes, snow and grey winter skies. What his teacher gave him in 1868, the year painted at the lower right, is a figure more than a metre tall. A bearded man in full plate armour stands with one hand on his hip near the hilt of his sword. He wears a soft black hat with a red plume. Behind him, in the shadows, a smaller figure bends forward. The Louvre also calls the picture The Knight. It came to the museum in 1921, bequeathed by Joseph Reinach, the politician and historian who had campaigned for Captain Dreyfus.