Country House Window

In 1866 Abbati moved out to Castelnuovo della Misericordia, in the hills behind the coast south of Livorno, and worked in the rooms of a farmhouse there. Small panels came out of that stay, a little door, some barrels, a cellar, and this window. The room is almost entirely dark, the shutter is pushed open, and everything that is lit belongs to the countryside outside.

He had two years left to live. The museum catalogues the panel as attributed to him rather than certainly his, and describes it as traditionally given to Abbati; no other name has ever been put forward, and the specialist on his work accepts it and dates it to about 1866, but the reservation stands in the record. It came to the city of Florence in 1979, given by Luisa Ambron, and was hung with the rest of the 19th-century Tuscan rooms in Palazzo Pitti.