Zingara with a Tambourine

Zingara is the Italian word for a Romani woman, and French readers knew the type well. Victor Hugo's Esmeralda, in Notre-Dame de Paris, dances in the cathedral square with a tambourine. Corot's young woman does nothing of the kind. She sits beside a slender tree in a wreath of leaves, a sleeveless white blouse and a pink skirt, one hand raised to her shoulder and the tambourine hanging from the other. The title and the instrument are all that make her a zingara. In 2012 the picture was shown at the Grand Palais in Bohèmes, an exhibition about how artists from Leonardo to Picasso imagined the Roma. The Louvre dates it broadly, between 1850 and 1875. The collector Jacques Laroche gave it in 1946 but kept the use of it, and it only entered the Louvre 30 years later, in 1976.