Mary Stuart at the Camp of Crookstone

Fattori signed this canvas in 1861, the year the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed and Florence filled with pictures of its own recent wars. He handed in a Scottish subject from three centuries earlier. Mary, Queen of Scots, stands with her ladies and the abbot of Santa Maria over the dying Douglas, one of the men who had helped her out of prison, after the battle that ended her cause in Scotland in 1568. Costume history like this was what an ambitious young painter was expected to produce, and he had been working on it since 1858.

What he was actually doing in those three years was practising something else. The picture is built around the way light falls across a group of figures in the open, and he set the whole arrangement out in patches of shadow and glare rather than in careful drawing. He signed it in capitals, with his hometown attached, GIOVANNI FATTORI DI LIVORNO, at the lower right.