A young man with dark hair and mustache smokes a cigarette as he rests between modeling sessions in an artist’s studio. A contemporary of the Impressionists, Carolus-Duran was one of the most prolific portrait painters working in Paris in the last half of the 19th century. Early in his career, he developed a strong interest in Spanish painting, especially the canvases of the 17th century master Diego Velasquez, whose revealing characterizations and somber colors are seen in much of his own work. Inspired by his success as a portraitist of fashionable Parisians, Carolus-Duran opened a studio in the 1870s and counted among his pupils, a number of Americans including John Singer Sargent and Theodore Robinson. The wherefore of the grand success of Carolus Duran is easily explained. He makes living beings, and he makes them thus because he so sees them. –Eugène Montrosier, Galerie Contemporaire, 1876