Monks in the Cloister of the Church of Gesù e Maria, Rome

This painting was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1808. It combines an appreciation for seventeenth-century Dutch cabinet pictures, which had been fashionable among French collectors since the late eighteenth century, with a new interest in the everyday life of contemporary Italians. In many of Granet’s Roman scenes, iconic settings are passed over in favor of lovingly observed but overlooked ones such as this cloister, located on the Via del Corso near his studio. Among the earliest admirers of these genre paintings was Granet’s closest colleague in Rome, the history painter J. A. D. Ingres.