The Hay Barn

Around 1905 Sartorio was the painter Italian institutions turned to for enormous decorative cycles. He had supplied panels for the Italian pavilion at the Saint Louis exposition of 1904, and in 1908 he took on the frieze for the chamber of deputies at Montecitorio in Rome, which held him for five years. This hayloft belongs to the other half of his working life. He had been drawing the countryside around Rome in pastel and watercolour since his late twenties, and this sheet is pastel, not oil. It is also not the gallery's property. The brass label beside it records it as a deposit from the municipal collections of Florence, placed here in 1912, and it carries two numbers rather than one, deposit 153 and general catalogue 113. Nobody has published its measurements.