Il riposo

By 1887 Italy had been a single kingdom for a generation, and Giovanni Fattori was still painting the people the new nation mostly overlooked. Here a farmhand sits in the field, hat off, the day's work paused. He has unhitched two white oxen, who take up the whole middle of the picture with their heavy, patient weight. The red cart behind them is tipped up and seen from below, an angle Fattori borrowed from the Japanese prints then circulating in Europe. It pushes the animals forward and flattens the sunlit Maremma behind. Fattori thought this one of his best canvases. It shows the flat coastal marshland of Tuscany where he spent his summers, ground that farmers were still slowly draining and working by hand.