In the Tailor's Workshop (The Menders)

In 1878 Paris held a Universal Exhibition, and Favretto, then in his late twenties, went there with his friend Guglielmo Ciardi, a Venetian landscape painter. This small canvas was probably painted for the occasion, and he showed it there with another picture, La ricetta. The subject is an everyday one, women mending in a tailor's workshop. That year the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the Paris art review, linked his manner to the taste for Japanese art then strong in France, and singled out the careful rendering of iridescent fabrics. The picture spent a long time in private collections before it came to the civic gallery in Turin.