The Young Cook, 1855-70 (oil on canvas)

Ribot was a naturalist painter who specialized in domestic genre scenes and religious works. In this small painting, a butcher boy tempts a cat with a slice of meat. This work typifies the kitchen scenes that Ribot began to produce in the late 1850s. He often painted at night by candlelight, a fact that might have contributed to the limited range of colors and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow in his works. Like so many of his colleagues at this time, Ribot was influenced by Dutch, Spanish, and French 17th-century paintings in the Louvre Museum.