The Fugitive, Study for Timon of Athens

Within months of his arrival in Paris, Francisco Oller entered the studio of the popular painter Thomas Couture, who completed this study from life at about the same time. Couture taught the importance of drawing, anatomy, and classical proportions, the traditional European art-school curriculum dating back to Italian academies in the Renaissance. His painting style was a combination of the real and the ideal, and he trained students to “reproduce the wonders of nature and ideas of our own time,” though never to the degree of Oller’s other great mentor in Paris, Gustave Courbet.

Oller submitted two paintings to the 1865 Paris Salon exhibition as a pupil of Couture.