Farmer

In the early 1900s Balla’s interest was increasingly captured by social issues and the literature of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Zola and Gorky, which led him to develop a particular concern for the humble and the dispossessed. The result of this was his Dei Viventi [The Living] cycle, painted between 1902 and 1909 (the year in which the series was exhibited for the first time). The Farmer, which forms part of this series and was acquired by the Accademia di San Luca using funds from the Müller endowment (which financed the acquisition of works that had been on show in Roman exhibitions), is one of a group of paintings sharing an identical format, the most famous of which is probably the La Pazza [The Madwoman] (1905), now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome; other examples, rather darker in tone, include Il Mendicante [The Beggar] (1902) and I Malati [The Sick] (1905).