The Painter Adolphe Desbrochers, child, holding an orange

The title tells this little boy's future. He is Adolphe Desbrochers, born in 1841, who grew up to be a painter and died in 1902. When Corot painted him in 1845 he was about four. He sits in a wooden chair with turned knobs on its back, in a dark coat with a broad white collar and a wide black hat, his cheeks flushed, an orange held in one hand. The canvas is tiny, 24 centimetres high. It reached the museum by a roundabout route. Mathilde Gautier bequeathed it in 1919 but reserved its use for her husband, and he gave up that right in 1922. In 2010 the stage and film director Patrice Chéreau chose it for the exhibition on faces and bodies that he put together inside the Louvre.