Study for "An Aragonese Smuggler"

William Turner Dannat

Oil on canvas

Art Institute of Chicago

This oil on canvas is a preparatory study for William Turner Dannat's large-scale, full-length composition depicting a peasant boy stealing a drink from a pitcher. Dannat, an American artist born in 1853 in Hempstead, New York, trained at the Munich Royal Academy of Fine Arts and later under the Hungarian painter Mihály Munkácsy in Paris, drawing inspiration from 17th-century Spanish masters such as Diego Velázquez. His realist style, characterized by loose, expressive brushstrokes, is fully evident in this study as well as in the finished painting. The completed work, "An Aragonese Smuggler" (1883), was acquired by the French government when it was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1883, and this preparatory study entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection as early as 1887, making it one of the institution's earliest acquisitions.