The Artist's Daughter

Augustin Théodule Ribot · c. 1865

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

29.8 × 21 cm (11 3/4 × 8 1/4 in.); Framed: 40.4 × 32.1 × 7 cm (15 7/8 × 12 5/8 × 2 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Théodule Ribot painted his daughter with the same unflinching tenderness he brought to kitchen maids and candlelit still lifes — a quiet intimacy that makes this small portrait feel unusually close. Ribot was a largely self-taught French realist who rose to prominence in the 1860s through his deep admiration for Velázquez, Ribera, and the Dutch masters. He built his reputation on dark-toned genre scenes — cooks, musicians, monks — rendered with a rough, honest touch that set him apart from the polished academic painters of his era. In portraits like this one, that same directness becomes something warmer: a father looking carefully at his child. Ribot won a medal at the 1864 Salon, the same period in which this work was painted, and his reputation among fellow realists was considerable — Courbet and Fantin-Latour both admired his work. The painting now held at the Art Institute of Chicago stands as one of the more personal works in his catalogue, stripped of the theatrical staging that characterised his genre scenes. Our hand-painted oil reproduction faithfully recreates Ribot's characteristic surface — the dark ground, the soft fall of light across the figure, the honest directness of his brushwork — so that this tender family portrait feels as present on your wall as it did in his studio.