Return to the Stable (The Retreat)

Carlo Pittara showed this picture at the Turin Promotrice in 1866, among the farmyard subjects he sent there every year of that decade. It is built almost entirely on greys and browns to give the feel of rain, with long horizontal lines broken by the two upright shepherds and their brightly coloured umbrellas, as the flock comes back to the fold. Pittara was known to his contemporaries above all as a painter of animals, and in 1967 the Turin art historian Andreina Griseri wrote that before the sheep of Pellizza and Segantini, these were the best-loved animals to emerge from 19th-century painting. Some critics of his own day disliked his insistence on the humble world of shepherds. Others accepted him because he kept to the traditional language of painting, and in 1893 the critic Alessandro Stella judged him free of the daring and the brutality of Courbet.