Provenance:
-Private Collection to 2007

Alessandro Battaglia was a grand son of the artist Roberto Bompiani, whose highly finished paintings of Roman antiquity earned him the nickname "the Italian Bouguereau." Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Battaglia became a painter and worked in Anticoli Corrado, a small town in the mountains behind Tivoli. The models, who were renowned for their beauty, dressed in their traditional costumes, used to gather on the Spanish Steps where they waited for the artists to offer them work. He married one of these models and inspired by the simplicity of their rustic routine, abandoned his grandfather's depiction a more or less imaginary past, to paint them going about their everyday lives.

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