Project Description
Camillo Innocenti (Rome 1871 – 1961), Portrait of woman
Watercolor and pencil on canvas cm 20 x 16.
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Already in contact with Hans von Marees and Ludovico Seitz in the years of high school, Innocenti then attended the Institute of Fine Arts in Rome and began with paintings of present suggestions of Morelliane and left-handed (landscapes and figures in costume). After a series of trips principled with the important Spanish stay of 1901 (he studied Goya and Velazquez), in 1903/04 he joined the Divisionism, although he joined the group of XXV of the Roman Campagna and from 1905 to 1918 developed his own chromatic research overcoming the postimpressionism up to color outcomes with fauve taste spots, together with floral interpretations of the D’Annunzian atmosphere. Abandoned the easel from 1918 to 1925 for the scenography and the cinematographic costumes, he stayed from 1925 to 1940 in Egypt where he resumed painting with oriental subjects of illustrative taste.
The works presented here can be traced back to the period following the experience in the land of the Pharaohs, dating back to the early 1940s. These are two female portraits – in one of these Anna Piazzani is recognizable, linked by a deep friendship with the painter since the years of Cairo – in which the thick contour line and the soft chromatic veins carried out with pastel, offer a singular proof of the Innocent portraitist. In particular, it is in the depths of the affections that the artist’s ability to observe finds the highest and most compelling expression. A different speech, however, for the third painting depicting a trattoria (Italian typical restaurant) lit in the moonlight: the work, dated 1914, is placed in the post-divisionist season of the painter, back from the Parisian success of 1913: in that year there was a solo-exhibition of Innocenti in the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which definitively consecrated his international success.
