This composition, showing an impoverished family gathered in the murky light of a sparsely furnished garret, was initially conceived by Prud’hon as a collaboration with his pupil and longtime mistress, Constance Mayer. Following her suicide in May 1821, Prud’hon prepared this oil sketch and completed the full-scale version of the painting, now lost, as his final submission to the Salon before his own death little more than a year later. Une famille dans la désolation became the prototype for an entire genre of paintings popular throughout the nineteenth century: melodramatic scenes of the suffering urban poor.
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