The Italian Brigand's Wife

Léon Cogniet's The Italian Brigand's Wife (1825) belongs to the vogue for images of Italian banditry and mountain life that captivated French Romantic painters who had visited the Roman Campagna, where real brigands made travel genuinely dangerous well into the nineteenth century. Cogniet, who spent the years 1817-1830 as a resident at the French Academy in Rome, depicted the subject with the sympathy of someone who had observed actual life in the Italian hills. The brigand's world offered Romantic painters the combination of wildness, loyalty, and fierce independence they found lacking in the orderly civilization of Paris. The work is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cogniet frames the brigand's wife in a rugged Italian landscape setting, with rocky crags and atmospheric distance providing a picturesque backdrop suited to the subject's romance. The figure is painted with directness and warmth; the handling is confident and fluid, allowing the landscape and figure to coexist on equal pictorial terms rather than subordinating one to the other.