Egisto Ferroni

Ferroni grew up at Lastra a Signa, a short way down the Arno from Florence, in the district where thousands of women plaited wheat straw at home for the hat trade. That is the work in Le trecciaiole, the straw-plaiters, which he showed in Florence in 1868, and the painters Adriano Cecioni and Telemaco Signorini, both of the Macchiaioli, noticed it at once.

He had trained at the Florence academy in the 1850s under Stefano Ussi and begun with historical subjects, then turned to the fields and stayed there. In the summer of 1875 he travelled to Paris with Giovanni Fattori, the oldest of that same group, and looked hard at French painting of rural labour. His later pictures hold their figures in a calm, solemn cadence. The dealer Luigi Pisani was buying by then and took Alla fonte, the queue at the village fountain that now hangs at Palazzo Pitti, which the critic Diego Martelli praised.

Family trouble drove him out to the countryside around 1890 and he largely stopped exhibiting, though he came back with ten paintings at a Florence show in 1907. He died in 1912, at 76.