#family

Apparently that's his own family and friends in their own sitting room. Painting your relatives is cheaper than hiring models — though from the faces, the sitting went on a while.

It's his aunt's family, painted during a long stay in Florence. The marriage was, by most accounts, a miserable one, and she's dressed in black because she was mourning her own father — that's supposedly him in the little red drawing on the wall behind her.

He's said to have painted this partly to push back against the ugly minstrel-style caricatures of Black life that were common at the time - a quieter, more tender scene instead.

Wikipedia doesn't say much beyond names — apparently this is a real family, painted by a Czech-born LA artist who mixed hard cubist edges with a hazy hill-town backdrop.

I read that some people who've studied this closely think the older man's two hands look different on purpose - one softer, like it's meant to read as a mother's touch, the other firmer. Once you notice it, it's hard to unsee.

I couldn't track down who commissioned this one, but paintings like this were usually meant for a private chapel or a bedroom, not a church altar where everyone could see it.

By the time this was made, critics had started turning on this sort of thing — Diderot went after it in print, supposedly, for being pretty and false. Buyers carried on wanting it regardless.

The woman here is apparently Morisot's own sister, watching her new baby — this was one of the pieces Morisot showed at the very first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and from what I can find it barely sold at the time.

Scenes of an ordinary household became fashionable late on — no gods, no mythology, just a room at night. There's a long-running muddle about which version is which: it was matched for years to a picture sold at auction in the 1780s until, according to Wikipedia, a closer match surfaced in a collection in Estonia around 2009.

The death in it happened when he was a boy — his sister — but he didn't paint it until decades later, and from what I can find that's why the family in the room are all the age they were when he picked up the brush, not the age they were at the time.