Project Description

Giacomo Grosso ( Cambiano 1860 – Turin 1938 ), Carriages drivers’ running towards Porta Nuova station in Turin

Oli on panel cm 40 x 58 signed and dated ( 1900? ) lower right, with inscription indicating the painting’s title on the back.

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“Long spent years and change of manners and taste had not influenced the artistic personality of Giacomo Grosso, nor the preference constantly shown by a significant part of the public for the old painter from Turin. Almost sixty years of assiduous work, powered by an easy and elegant fertility which did not abandon Grosso even towards the end of his life, had gathered around him a multitude of faithful admirers. His beginnings were triumphant, assuring him early fame with some very large works of romantic narrative character, despite the heightened naturalism of the execution, which had their highest success in the famous painting, gone then destroyed, The Supreme Convention.

[…] In recent years the distinguished painter had addressed with special predilection to still life, finding in contact with the humblest reality that brilliant freshness of tone and that amazing reproductive efficiency of the visible True, that had let him get the resounding success of the beginnings. In this way the good teacher has closed his abundant and successful career”. With these words full of admiration, Luigi Federzoni, president of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy, recalled the Turin painter, named senator in 1929, a few days after his death.

 

Giacomo-Grosso

That “change of manners”, synthetic effective expression to define the eclecticism of the Turin master, and that “amazing reproductive efficiency of the visible True”, caught in a variety of lights and shades, find a superlative proof in this painting, whose subject represents the running of the carriage drivers to the Porta Nuova station in Turin, immortalized in a dreamy twilight atmosphere. The painting is probably one of the most shining proof of the small format paintings made en plein air by the painter, an expressive type that appeared in 1902 at the Turin Quadrennial with a solo-exhibition that definitely ratified his success.

The fog that seems to envelop the whole atmosphere suspended in the composition; coachmen drawn as slender silhouette in the shadows of the evening and in the reflection of an avenue just wet by the rain; the buildings, sloping on the background, tending to dematerialization: all elements that lead to a stylistic update got by Grosso, a painter with an European dimension, based on the latest innovations introduced by French impressionism.