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Vincenzo Gemito Portrait af a Boy

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Vincenzo Gemito

Naples 1852 - 1929

 

 

Portrait of a Boy

Point of the brush and watercolour and gouache over black chalk,
with plentiful white heightening.

Signed, inscribed and dated: V. Gemito/1915/ Genazzano.
274 x 186 mm (10 ½ x 7 ¼ in.)

Provenance

Private Collection, Florence.


The present work, dating from 1915, has a specific medium common to a small number of other beautiful portrait heads dating to around the same period, some of which Gemito made during the second half of the year while he was living in Gennazzano, a small hill-top town outside of Rome. The painterly use of white heightening, strong ink, and the colours red and blue are at once striking and harmonious and can be seen again in a profile portrait of a young girl with a head-scarf dating from the same moment and with the same inscription, Genazzano1, as well as in a fine depiction of a Young Woman with an Urn dating from 19132. Gemito is known to have spent six months in Genazzano resting, away from the demands of the city, but still intensely active and taking inspiration from the young people of the town whom he drew with sympathy and tenderness. Another study of a young boy, possibly even the same depicted here, is in the Mazzotta collection; it is drawn in pen and ink only, just with touches of white heightening and has the inscription: Genazzano and the specific date: 27 Agosto3.

Vincenzo Gemito holds a unique position in Italian art of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; broadly famous as a sculptor he was also a draughtsman of exceptional brilliance. Mostly self-taught, his sculptures, both in terms of quality and technique belong, nevertheless, to the tradition of classical statuary and the great Renaissance masters and are characterised by a fusion of naturalism and grace. Rebellious and independent by nature, he also had a voracious appetite for culture and learning. Gemito was abandoned as a child, left on the doorstep of a Foundling Hospital in Naples. At the age of 9, he pleaded with a local sculptor to be allowed into the workshop as an apprentice, using the churches of Naples as museums in which he could absorb the work of the 17th and 18th Century painters and the Museo Archeologico as his greatest source for learning.

Gemito’s first success came at the age of 16 when he sold a sculpture to the King of Italy, Vittorio Emmanuele II. Ten years later, he moved to Paris, where he met Giovanni Boldini (who lent him money) and made particular friends with Ernest Meissonier. He began exhibiting at the Paris Salons, winning the Grand Prix in 1879. Gemito returned to Naples in 1880 whilst continuing to send work to Paris, but from 1887 he suffered bouts of mental illness and increasingly and for most of the next twenty years, limited himself to drawing. He spent almost a year on Capri, his chief model being his wife, Anna Cutolo. Drawing was at the heart of his realistic and detailed approach to sculpture and over time, he produced an enormous number of figure and portrait studies in various media: pen, chalk, pastel and watercolour and sometimes a combination of all of these. His work on paper was often the structure on which his sculptures were based but his drawings are also of exceptional aesthetic quality in their own right4.

1    See exhibition catalogue, loc. cit., cat.48, Ragazza di Genazzano and p.275 of the biography.
2    With Jean-Luc Baroni, London.
3    See exhibition catalogue, loc. cit., cat. 49, Ragazzo con berretto.
4    See Bruno Mantura, qualche considerazione sui disegni di Gemito, essay in exhibition catalogue, Gemito, Naples, Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes, 2009, p.49.

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