Italian painter and etcher. Initially established as a painter of military subjects, he came to be one of the leading Italian plein-air painters of landscape with figures. He was one of the leaders of the group known as the Macchiaioli. Towards the end of his life he produced many excellent etchings, mainly of rural subjects.
Battle of Magenta (June 4, 1859) was an engagement between France and Austria in the Franco-Piedmontese war during the second war of Italian independence (1859–61). The outcome was a narrow French victory. The scene of the fighting was Magenta, 19 km west of Milan, in Austrian-dominated northern Italy. It involved some 54.000 French troops under Napoleon III and 58.000 Austrian troops under General Franz Gyulai. The French victory, which came after a highly disorganized battle, cost 4.000 men killed and wounded and 600 missing; Austrian losses were 5.700 killed and wounded and more than 4.000 missing.
Looking with confidence at the viewer, Fattori, not yet thirty years old, is holding a painter’s palette and a brush in his left hand as signs of his artistic vocation. Best known for his colourful landscape paintings, he also represented key events in recent Italian history of the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement.
This panel is a preparatory sketch for The Battle of Custoza, 1866, a large painting executed between 1876 and 1880, now preserved in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.
Even the wind on a deserted beach can be the subject of a painting. The revolution represented by the Macchiaioli movement could not be better exemplified.
The mid-nineteenth century in Italy was the period of the Risorgimento, the movement that culminated in Italian unification. That movement provided the political and cultural backdrop for one of the most important and influential groups in Italian art in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Macchiaioli. This group of landscape, portrait and genre painters, flourishing from about 1850 to 1880, was based on Florence. The core of the Macchiaioli consisted of eleven painters born between 1824 and 1838, most important of them among the older painters were Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Serafino de Tivoli, and Vincenzo Cabianca, while Giuseppe Abbati and Telemaco Signorini belonged to the younger. There were some other artists associated with the group to varying extent, such as Guglielmo Ciardi, Giuseppe de Nittis, Federigo Zandomeneghi, and Giovanni Boldini. The last-named three all took their bearings from France, and eventually moved to Paris.
Alongside history paintings, the early period of the Macchiaioli notably included the Castiglioncello School of landscape art, of significance in the 1860s in particular. (The school was named after the Tuscan coastal town where the artists gathered to work.) The painters of this school, among them Giuseppe Abbati, Odoardo Borrani, and Giovanni Fattori, constituted a homogenous subgroup within the Macchiaioli. At first Abbati’s art was to the fore, subsequently that of Fattori.
At Castiglioncello, Fattori painted not only a number of highly successful portraits but also enchanting landscape studies such as The Haystack. The simple compositional structure and his characteristically broad brushwork of the early period are particularly engaging in this painting.
