The Moneylender (The Antique Dealer)

Induno signed this canvas in the lower right corner, D. INDUNO 53, and showed it in Florence at the Promotrice exhibition that same year. The title has never settled. The gallery carries it as both the moneylender and the antique dealer, because the man in the middle is both, a pawnbroker sitting among the stock that has passed through his hands.

The 19th-century photographic catalogues spelled the scene out at length. The pawnbroker, surrounded by his old junk, is looking over the last jewels brought in by a lady who has come down in the world. That is the kind of picture buyers wanted in the 1850s, a small domestic disaster with the circumstances legible in the furniture.

The following year Induno painted the subject again for the Brera exhibition in Milan, pressing the lesson harder, and meant to call that version Disaster and Comfort.