The Libecciata

The libeccio is the wind that comes in off the sea from the southwest, warm and wet and heavy with salt, and on the coast below Livorno it bends everything that grows there. Fattori painted this small panel in the early 1880s at Antignano, just south of the town, where a stand of tamarisks takes that wind head on. There is no story in it and nobody in it. A tree leans almost to the ground over stones, sand and scrubby grass, and the sea behind it is white with broken water.

He was in his late fifties by then and had been painting this shoreline for 30 years. When he died in August 1908, the commission that was assembling a modern collection for Florence bought the panel almost at once from Giovanni Malesci, the pupil who had inherited his studio. The expert report written for that purchase said Fattori had got as much expression out of the tree as another painter would get out of a human face.