Oil on canvas, 65×51.5 cm
Before 1914
Manciano, private collection
This attractive genre scene, painted according to the stylistic principles of international realism, seems to evoke the seventeenth-century Dutch tradition in offering the image of a woman intent on her work in a domestic interior illuminated only by the feeble morning light pouring in through the little window. But in reality this is not an autonomous picture but a preparatory oil sketch for the painting Resigned, which presents, with very few changes in the final version, this image of the woman – according to the writing on the back of the canvas – mending her husband’s only pair of trousers.