Cowboys and herds in the Maremma

Cowboys and Herds in the Maremma, painted in 1893 and held in the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori, is one of the culminating works of Fattori's long engagement with the Tuscan pastoral landscape. The butteri — Maremman cowboys who managed the semi-wild cattle herds of the coastal marshes — were among his favourite subjects, embodying a preindustrial relationship to land and animals that was already disappearing. By 1893 Fattori had painted the Maremma for more than three decades, and his vision of it had deepened from observation into something closer to identity — this landscape and these people were as much his subjects as the Risorgimento battles. The broad, sun-baked compositions of these late Maremma works are among the most powerful things he made.

The composition is characteristically wide and low-horizoned, allowing the herd and riders to spread across a flattened pictorial space that emphasises the expansiveness of the Maremma. Fattori's brushwork for cattle and horses is at its most accomplished — authoritative, summary, and anatomically convincing. The palette is bleached and warm, full of high summer heat.