The stop of the muleteers in Maremma

The Stop of the Muleteers in Maremma, painted around 1900, depicts a rest halt of muleteers — the men who drove pack mule trains across the Tuscan landscape — in the coastal plain of the Maremma. By 1900 Fattori was returning repeatedly to the pastoral themes of the Maremma world, documenting working life that was already beginning to change under modernisation. The muleteer occupation, ancient and independent, belonged to the pre-railway economy of rural transport and was a fitting subject for a painter who consistently valued the working life of the Tuscan countryside over modernity's encroachments. Late in his career these Maremma subjects have an elegiac quality — documentation of a world in its final years.

Late Fattori handling employs broad, confident strokes that describe both animals and figures with economy and authority. The Maremma landscape is indicated through the simplest horizontal means — flat ground, distant hills, wide sky. Mules and muleteers share the pictorial space with the equal weight that Fattori gave to human and animal subjects throughout his career.