First Steps
Artist: Franz Ludwig Catel (German, 1778–1856)
Original Dimensions: 18 3/4" x 14 3/4"
Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
About Artwork: (ca. 1820–25) "The theme of a child’s first steps was a popular subject of genre paintings in the uncertain years following the French Revolution, owing largely to its reassuring message of continuity. Catel, who studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, would also have been familiar with the related allegory of the Ages of Man, the subject of a major Salon painting by François Gérard (1808; Musée Condé, Chantilly). The present work shares the Italian setting of Gérard’s but updates its antique dress by depicting a contemporary peasant family." - (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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