Italiensk morlille tager sig et hvil 

Carl Bloch painted this image of a resting Italian mother, we think, sometime in the mid-19th century. But who was Carl Bloch and how was he trained? Bloch came from Denmark at a time when the local Royal Academy was at the height of its power. It had a very particular, conservative idea about what makes good art and they valued proper realism above all. It was part of the curriculum to go abroad and paint people in their local environs. Bloch painted his Italian mother in just such a manner. And what does it mean to picture someone like this? What does the image tell us about the kind of social structures that existed at the time? To begin to answer this question, we would need to know more about the image's exhibition history and critical reception. Such institutional records can tell us much about the values circulating at the time and how pictures were a part of this value system.