At the Fountain

Ferroni painted this at Ponte a Signa, on the Arno a few miles downstream from Florence, in 1879. The canvas is 285 centimetres high and 165 wide, the scale a painter would normally keep for a battle or a martyrdom, and what fills it is country people waiting their turn at a fountain for the day's water.

He sent it to the national exhibition in Turin in 1880, then to the Florentine Promotrice the year after, and the official critics passed over it both times. That produced a small revolt among the Tuscan painters. Giovanni Fattori and Adriano Cecioni, both of the Macchiaioli, and the critic Diego Martelli objected in public, and Cecioni called it a great Tuscan work.

Ferroni was working in the current then called field painting, which came out of Millet in France and put weight on the feeling of country life. The picture hangs in Room 20 of the Gallery of Modern Art, on the second floor of the Palazzo Pitti.