Pencil, tempera and watercolour, on card.
Signed and dated V.GEMITO 1914.
380 x 285mm. (15 x 111/4 in.)
PROVENANCE: Private collection.
EXHIBITED: Naples, Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes, Gemito, 2009, cat.43.
Vincenzo Gemito was given to an orphanage and brought up by an artisan. At the age of ten he was working for a painter and sculptor and by the time he was twelve he had enrolled at the Naples Academy of Fine Art. King Victor Emmanuele II bought one of his first exhibited works and immediately presented it to the Museo di Capodimonte for permanent display. Gemito moved to Paris in 1877 and his reputation as an exceptional sculptor grew. Ten years later as he struggled with a disliked commission for a marble statue of Charles V for the Royal Palace in Naples Gemito suffered a mental collapse and for the next twenty years at least, worked solely as a draughtsman.
Mastro Ciccio was Gemito’s adopted father and favourite model and over a long stretch of years, he posed for the artist for hours on end. This drawing, highly worked in watercolour and white gouache, was described as an extraordinary portrait, of great intensity in the 2009 exhibition catalogue. Here Gemito depicts Mastro Ciccio posed as a Biblical figure, his brow furrowed and gaze focused on an inward universe. The figure is of course an archetypal one and to some extent reflects Gemito’s own appearance yet the profile pose gives the head a stillness and nobility which sets this beautiful study apart from other of Gemito’s bearded heads in which anxiety and the weight of age are more apparent.1
Notes:
1. See for example cats. 19 (another Prophet figure) and 42 in the 2009 exhibition catalogue.
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