Large Wall Mirror Wood Glass Italy 1950s

Glimpse of Mandello Lario 1909

Oil on canvas. Signature and location (Mandello) lower left. On the back additional signature, date and title in full. Riccardo Pellegrini, a Milanese painter, was a pupil of Domenico Morelli and was educated in the climate of romanticism. He was a landscape painter and genre painter, but he also created valuable still lifes, with bright colors and a precise and realistic drawing. His landscape production drew on the various places he visited and lived, in Italy and abroad, especially in Spain and France. In this landscape, Pellegrini offers a glimpse of the mountain that overlooks the town on the shores of Lake Como: a barren and bare mountain, albeit inhabited, with the hut on the top and a female figurine that fills the buckets at the stream of flowing water. between the rocks; the colors are those of the winter mists, divided almost transversely between the gray-blue of the upper part, with clouds laden with rain that dominate the peaks on the other side of the lake (which can be sensed, without being seen), and the green-brown of the land that occupies the lower half, with the branches of the bare trees stretched out to connect the two halves. The quiet of the mountains, the title of the work, clearly shines through and pervades the mind of the observer. The painting is presented in a contemporary frame.

Oil on canvas. Central European School. The scene is set in the shop of a barber, who is intent on cutting a man's hair under the watchful eye of other customers and, above all, of some women with children, one of whom even observes the result of his work with glasses. Glasses were introduced in art first as a sign of distinction, and later also as a sign of scientific attention, progressively delineating the figure of the scholar, doctor and surgeon: in this painting, they actually underline the irony of the scene, and they are used as a tool for a close female examination of the spouse's haircut! The whole scene is filled with figures, painted in a crude and almost grotesque way, with very marked, almost theatrical expressions and poses, underlined as well by the bright colours. Due to these characteristics, the painting fits well into that production of genre scenes based on popular life captured in its most lively and characteristic moments, which originated in the seventeenth century in Central Europe, especially in the Netherlands, to replace naturalistic and religious painting with lighter subjects, and which in Italy found a particular expression in the "Bamboccianti School", developed in Rome by Flemish and Italian painters. The painting has been restored and relined. It is presented in an antique frame.