September Morning in Settignano

From the late 1870s Signorini kept going back to Settignano, the hill village east of Florence, and for about 15 years he painted its lanes and courtyards over and over. This is the yard of an inn kept by the Scheggi family. September light falls on the old vines gone gnarled against the house front, on the shutters and the wooden fence, and the brightest thing in the whole picture is a white cat sitting on a stool. King Umberto I bought it in 1892 out of the Florence exhibition of the Societa d'Incoraggiamento di Belle Arti, which is how a village yard entered the royal collections and came to this palace. The canvas is 58 by 65 centimetres and signed at the lower left, and the label on the frame still gives those royal collections as where it came from.