Oxen Plowing

Oxen Plowing, painted in 1911 on linen and held at the Brooklyn Museum, demonstrates Ettore Tito's engagement with the agricultural subject — a significant departure from his better-known Venetian maritime and figure paintings. By 1911 the peasant labor subject had a complex pictorial history: Millet's monumental French peasants, Segantini's Alpine laborers, and the Macchiaioli's Tuscan farm subjects had all established different interpretive frameworks. Tito's oxen plowing the field aligns him with a tradition of dignifying agricultural labor through monumental scale and serious pictorial treatment, rather than the pastoral idealization of an earlier generation. The Brooklyn Museum's acquisition of the work indicates its circulation through the international market that brought significant Italian paintings to American collections in the early twentieth century.

The linen support provides a different texture from canvas — slightly finer, with a distinct tooth — and its use suggests Tito made a deliberate material choice for this subject. Agricultural subjects demand convincing rendering of earth, sky, and animal musculature simultaneously, and Tito's broad, painterly handling is well suited to capturing the weight and effort of plowing through loaded impasto passages in the soil and confident anatomical drawing in the oxen.