The Elder Sister (Filial Love)

On 2 May 1887 the king and queen of Italy opened a national art exhibition in the Napoleonic gardens at the eastern edge of Venice. A cavalry barracks there had been converted into the main pavilion, and 1,142 paintings went up in it and in kiosks along the paths. This was one of them. Eight years later the same gardens held the first Venice Biennale, and the 1887 show is usually described as its rehearsal.

What Pestellini sent was small and domestic. The state record calls it simply a family scene and keeps the Italian title in two parts, La sorella maggiore and, in brackets, Amor filiale, which is the register a Florentine public of the 1880s was asked to read it in.

The painting reached the state collection much later, as a gift from Lorenzo and Ippolito Pestellini Lavarelli.