Jovem italiano sentado

Corot reached Rome in the winter of 1825. He was 29, and had not long before talked his father, a Paris cloth merchant, into letting him drop the family trade for painting. The French artists in the city all worked to a rule their teachers had drilled in, that a landscape is worth nothing unless a person inhabits it, so alongside his views Corot hired models off the street and painted them in the room he rented at the Palazzo dei Pupazzi. This is one of them, a young man arranged like a piece of Roman statuary, in oil on a sheet of paper about 23 by 30 centimetres. He went on working this way for three years in Italy. The study stayed in private hands until 1995, when the museum in Reims bought it.