The Turtle Seller

In 1854 Puvis de Chavannes was not yet 30, and he was still painting with the warm colour and busy storytelling he would later drop entirely. This street scene is set in Venice. A young Black turtle seller sprawls against a pillar on the quay, a slice of watermelon behind him and one of his turtles upside down by his foot. He twists round, mouth open, to watch a woman in a red shawl and her companion, who are busy with their little dogs. Farther off, a woman carries water pails on a yoke and leads a child by the hand. Puvis showed the picture in Marseille in 1855, then kept it for the rest of his life. The Musée d'Orsay bought it in 2014. Its older title, which called the boy by a word now out of use, survives only in the museum's records.