Jean-Victor SCHNETZ (1787-1870) Old Italian woman with distaff. Oil on canvas. 54.8 x 48.8 cm. This composition has been the subject of several replicas with variants (Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Havre, Musée Malraux, Québec, Musée du séminaire). The Le Havre version is given by some to Théodore Géricault, a friend of Schnetz's. The Diseuse de Bonne Aventure, another composition, made in six copies, certainly painted by Schnetz, represents the same old woman with her typical hairstyle, her stare, her empty gaze and her smoky skin. We find this strange model among painters who were in Rome in the 1820s (Léon and Amélie Cogniet). The model seems to have been identified as a brigand's wife, originally from Sonnino, mother of Maria Grazia Boni, then companion of Jean Victor Schnetz. Passionate about Italy, Schnetz was the director of the French Academy in Rome in 1841 and is one of the "painters of the Just Middle", between the Romantic and the Neo-Classical, who treat picturesque subjects with an Ingresque brush.