After the apprenticeship with Augusto Burchi and the collaboration with Francesco Vinea, who will provide him with a structured iconographic background, Giulio Bargellini got, at the turn of the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century, the contract with the Florentine merchant Giovanni Hautmann, for which the artist frescoed the facade of the gallery in Borgo Ognissanti, now destroyed but known through an archive photo.  

By Hautmann the artist painted a series of works with an idyllic theme, young girls caught in solitary dialogue in lush gardens, subjects that favorably met the taste of the sophisticated international Florentine clientele, but which the gallerist also proposed directly overseas. 

Similar to the work in question is, for example, the painting Mestizia (1889), known through an Alinari photo, cognate by setting and for the same contemplative spirit e fervent breath featuresno the figure. 

This series of works of a more "sentimental" nature shortly precedes Bargellini's turn towards the so-called classical genre painting Anglo-Saxon, especially in the version suggested by Sir Alma Tadema. 

The technical skill of the artist, evident in the delicate chromaticism of the crossed hands that hold flowery branches and in the transparent brushstroke that allows a glimpse of the canvas, they coincide perfectly with the words that Galileo Chini noted in his diary precisely in relation to the artist's way of painting: “Bargellini worked with little color so that the paint became transparent, not having that too thick paste which has the defect of peeling” (Galileo Chini, I Quaderno. Appunti e verità vissute, in Il tarlo polverizza anche la quercia. Memorie di Galileo Chini, edited by Fabio Benzi, Florence 1998, p. 34). 

Theextremely rare works performed over the years of working with Hautmann e the match with measures indicate reasonably suggests that the painting may coincide with the portrait Madam, exposed in occasion of the Exhibition-Sale of 19th century paintings set up at the Art Gallery “Firenze” in December 1939 (Esposizione-Vendita di pitture dell'800, “Florence” Art Gallery, December 1939 XVIII, sp, n. 4). 

This work has been archived in the artist's General Catalogue, by the writer and coming soon, with inventory number 3/2023. 

Francesco Parisi

June 2023