Le chien “chinois”

The artist’s little Chinese dog, painted in 1884 as a small animal study by the portraitist who dominated Parisian society painting in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Carolus-Duran, trained by the realist François Souchon and at the Villa Medici, taught John Singer Sargent and ended his career as director of the Académie de France in Rome; the intimate canvas shows a lighter side of an artist known above all for grand likenesses. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.