Ruth

By 1853 Francesco Hayez was the grand old man of Italian Romantic painting, past sixty and well past his most inventive years, and Ruth was the single work he sent that year to the Bologna academy's exhibition. It drew crowds anyway. He paints the Moabite widow of the Bible at the moment she goes to glean leftover grain in the fields of Boaz, a poor woman gathering what the harvesters have dropped. She holds a dark cloak wrapped around a few ears of wheat, her tunic loose, a metal band on her arm. A Bologna collector named Severino Bonora had commissioned the canvas and then handed it to the city, where it remains.