Giovane zingara

Karlis Huns was a Baltic German painter from what is now Latvia, trained in St Petersburg and much admired in the Russian art world of his day. He made this in the summer of 1870, a restless year in which he showed at the Paris Salon and then travelled on through Normandy and Belgium, where the canvas was painted. It shows a young Roma woman with a tambourine, the kind of picturesque genre subject that sold well across Europe at the time. Huns handled the warm skin and the bright cloth with an easy polish. He died only a few years later, in 1877, in his mid-forties, and his paintings ended up scattered between Riga, Moscow and St Petersburg.