In the manner of Giovanni Montelatici

At Breakfast Table was an immensely popular painting and reproduced in several mediums. Its painter, Pietro Saltini, studied in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and raised to become one of the most preeminent genre painters in the country. A panel with the same scene by Giovanni Montelatici is published by Anna Maria Massinelli, Painting in Stone, p.113, figs.78 (in a Private Collection, Los Angeles). The scene, depicting a content couple of elderly peasants reading the leisure pages of a newspapers, reveals a romanticised idea of the working classes in modern Italy.