Lady Working on the Terrace

After his wife died Cristiano Banti settled at the villa del Barone at Montemurlo, in the hills north-west of Florence, and spent most of his last 20 years there, in a house full of the pictures he had bought from his painter friends, several of whom he also put up. This small panel is that house. A woman sits sewing on the terrace, and the museum's record takes her to be his daughter Alaide, the one of his eight children closest to him. Their catalogue gives the support as wood and publishes no measurements for it at all. The date comes from the painting itself. He wrote the figures 82 in pen at the lower left, and that is 1882, the year he turned 58.