Théodore Chassériau

Like many of his contemporaries the French painter Théodore Chassériau paid greater attention to Italy’s people than to its landscape and historical monuments. He based this painting on a drawing made while passing through the port town of Gaeta during his Italian tour in 1840 and 1841. Despite firsthand knowledge of local peasant costumes, Chassériau simplified the robes of the peasant mother to a classical and timeless form. The picture thereby becomes both a peasant genre scene and a universal image of motherly love, infused with beauty and spiritual purity through its visual correspondence to Italian Renaissance images of the Virgin and Child.