Francesco Gioli

The present work was first sold in Alexandria, Egypt, to a member of King Farouk's Royal Family, circa 1921-1922
Acquired by the present owner's family from the above, 1952, in Alexandria, Egypt
Thence by descent to present owner

Painted in 1887.

Francesco Gioli was a second generation Macchiaioli artist, who with La Boscaiuole di San Rossore, captured the democratic and painterly ideals of this influential group of artists.  Founded in response to the Risorgimento, which unified Italy in democracy in the nineteenth century, the Macchiaioli made paintings that celebrated a specifically Italian way of life.  These pictures often show simple people of the countryside, free from Austro-Hungarian rule, and that of other former conquering powers that had previously kept Italy separated into staunchly divided regions for generations.  La Boscaiuole, which translates to "The Women Wood Gatherers", is surely Gioli's masterpiece.  The work was painted in 1887, after the Macchaiaoli had become a famous and respected group in Florence’s artistic milieu. 

The work is set in San Rossore, a wooded area just outside of Castiglioncello, where Diego Martelli, the art critic, had a summer home.  Gioli went there throughout the 1870s and 1880s with other artists such as Cristiano Banti and Giovanni Fattori, and from them he gained insight into the Macchiaioli’s methods and principles.  Banti and Fattori each painted female wood gatherers, and Fattori’s version created a scandal when it won an exhibition prize, due to its lowly subject brought to life on an impressive scale.  The two major figures of the first generation of the Macchiaioli, Giovanni Fattori and Silvestro Lega, also painted portraits of their young friend, Gioli, who went by the nickname "Cecco" among his fellow artists.

The women in the picture carry enormous loads of wood on their heads, trudging along in a rhythmic line.  The bundles are full of eye-catching detail: a red ribbon is wound around the wood at far left, and a boot hangs incongruously from the largest central stack.  These intricate additions emphasize the wood piles’ enormity and the back-breaking weight they represent to their humble, yet noble transporters.  The women, marching towards the viewer, cut off the majority of the landscape and invite the viewer to reflect upon their heroic power.  As Albert Boime discusses in The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, “Here there are no idling shepherds or pastoral accessories to encourage the contemplative stance; on the contrary, the work-laden women overpower the landscape field and seize the beholder’s attention, the sweep of the stark, barren environment heightens the effect of fatigue: the women appear to recede and advance in perspective across a wide expense of terrain, suggesting the long distance they have had to traverse and the distance they have yet to cover….the vertical line of the bodies…establish silhouettes of a tree-like form.” (Boime, p. 110)

The name Macchiaioli is a play on the word “Macchia”, which in Italian means “spot” or “underbrush”.  For these artists, the word came to denote a direct translation of a subject from nature to the canvas, without preparatory drawings or the traditional approach of recreating views in the artist’s studio from memory.  In the context of the Macchiaioli’s aims, La Boscaiuole di San Rossore is a tribute to the strength of Italian peasant women, while also being a detailed and stirring depiction of a wildflower-specked countryside, projected straight to the canvas from life and on a grand scale.