Unable to Wait

Formerly owned by the Florentine Alessandro Magnelli, the first great admirer of the work of the Macchiaioli and Giovanni Fattori in particular, this painting was subsequently in the collection of Giuseppe and Angela Bernocchi Solbiati in Milan until 1997. Signorini showed the work and its pendant Waiting (private collection) at the exhibition mounted by the Florence Promotrice in 1867, where they were praised by the critic Diego Martelli. Both works show a young lady visiting the painter’s studio. Shown here seated at a table and writing a letter, she can be identified as Caterina Eyre. Signorini had met her in Siena in the salon of Count De Gori in 1868–69, the period in which the painter gave drawing lessons to the children of the family. Frequently depicted by artists connected with the Macchiaioli movement, the subject has stylistic and iconographic affinities with Odoardo Borrani’s A Visit to My Studio (private collection), which he showed in Milan at the 2nd Esposizione Nazionale di Belle Arti in 1872. Involved with Borrani as from 1862 in the experience of the Piagentina School, Signorini captures all the immediacy of the scene in painting that is rapid, yet rich in sophisticated light effects. He devotes particular attention to certain details of the furnishings, such as the frames of the paintings crowded together on the wall.