Portrait of Signora Biliotti

Around 1865 Fattori was living in Livorno and painting the people immediately around him, family and friends and neighbours, mostly in small oval formats that were meant to hang in a house rather than go to an exhibition. This bust of a woman in dark clothes, still in its gilt oval frame, is one of them.

We know less about the sitter than about almost anything else in the room. The state catalogue prints her name as Signora Biliotti; Wikidata and the photographic records spell it Biliotto. Nothing else about her has come down with the picture, not her first name, not how Fattori knew her. The museum publishes no measurements for it either. What survives is the face, worked up in a few flat tones against a plain ground, at the point when he was making his living from commissions like this one.