Léon Bonnat

Léon Bonnat was the favourite portrait painter of French statesmen and celebrities, and his portraits are serious, solid and strongly lit against dark backgrounds, in the tradition of the Spanish painters he grew up admiring. He also painted religious pictures and warm, sunny scenes of Italian peasant girls and mothers with children.

Born in Bayonne in 1833, he spent his teens in Madrid, where his father ran a bookshop, trained there and studied Velázquez and Ribera. After three years in Rome he returned to Paris and became the leading portraitist of his day, winning the Salon medal of honour in 1869. He was an influential teacher, with pupils including Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Braque and Edvard Munch, and was director of the École des Beaux-Arts from 1905. His collection of old master drawings forms the heart of the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne. He died in 1922.

Italian Girl with a Jug (1875) is a good example of his Italian genre scenes.