Fisherman's Wife from Mola di Gaeta Embracing her Child

This 1850 Fisherman's Wife from Mola di Gaeta at the RISD Museum depicts an Italian peasant woman embracing her child with the combination of domestic tenderness and monumental gravity that Chassériau absorbed from Ingres's classical figure painting. Mola di Gaeta, a coastal town north of Naples, was part of the Italian journey Chassériau undertook in 1840–41, during which he encountered the Mediterranean peasant types—Calabrian shepherds, Pontine marsh workers, Neapolitan fishermen—that French Romantic painters had been representing since Léopold Robert. Chassériau brings his distinctive synthesis of classical rigor and Romantic emotional warmth to the Italian subject, giving peasant maternity the formal dignity of a Renaissance Madonna.

The mother and child are rendered with Chassériau's characteristic warmth and sensuous handling of flesh tones, the embrace captured with the combination of linear precision and coloristic richness that defined his mature style.