Carlo Pittara

In 1870 Carlo Pittara sent a painting of a plough team to an exhibition in Parma under a deliberately provocative title, Infallible System for Restoring the Italian Finances. It shows a farm manager watching one of his labourers bent over a plough drawn by two oxen, and it won the gold medal for painting. Pittara painted peasants and their animals all his life, and here, unusually for Piedmontese art of the time, he put the gap between the man who manages the land and the man who works it at the centre.

Born in Turin in 1835, he trained at the Accademia Albertina, spent two years in Geneva learning animal painting in the studio of Charles Humbert, and in Paris worked alongside Barbizon painters such as Constant Troyon and Charles Jacque. From 1860 he spent his summers at Rivara, in the Canavese hills north of Turin, as the guest of his brother-in-law, the banker Carlo Ogliani. In 1862 he invited the Portuguese painter Alfredo D'Andrade and the Genoese Ernesto Rayper to join him, and every summer until the mid-1870s a circle of artists gathered there to paint out of doors. Contemporaries called it the school of the future, and it is remembered as the School of Rivara, with Pittara as its moving spirit.

Later he lived in Rome and then, through the 1880s, mostly in Paris, where his fashionable strollers and Sunday outings on the Seine sold well. In 1889 he sat on the international painting jury of the Paris Universal Exhibition. He died at Rivara in 1891.