Young Peasant Girl on the Parapet

It is a very small picture, 12 centimetres by 22, painted in oil on a piece of cardboard rather than canvas. A peasant girl is asleep on a low parapet with the sea behind her. Signorini made a great many of these little boards in the 1880s, worked out of doors and finished on the spot, and the museum dates this one somewhere between 1880 and 1890 rather than to a year. What it does carry is writing at the lower right, where he signed and then dedicated it to a Signora Mazzoni. It stayed with her, and her heirs sold it to the gallery in 1946. The dedication is still legible on a surface not much larger than a postcard.