Istvan Mero Oil on Canvas Hungary XX Century - Nude of a Woman

Oil painting on canvas. The large composition, unsigned, offers a set of foods on the table of a simple kitchen: a large basket filled with vegetables from the garden, also scattered on the floor below, a plate with cheeses, two fish already cleaned; then stands out, on the rear wall, the altar with the sacred image ... flanked by a braid of garlic! The painting is presented in a gilded frame from the first half of the 20th century.

Portrait of a child

Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. Palermitan painter, Francesco Camarda distinguished himself for figure painting, dedicated to portraits and the nude, and above all for animalist painting, in the wake of the realist production of the Palizzi brothers. He was able to express a painting with a lively and fresh color. In this small canvas is proposed the portrait of a child sitting on a chair, hooded to frame the plump and smiling face, the direct gaze, the plump little hands resting on the knees in a proud and resolute pose. The work is presented in a contemporary frame.

Lean oil on ancient canvas. Signed G. Boni lower right. The two works propose two countryside landscapes, with buildings and classical architectural remains, and figurines of commoners, in one canvas intent on daily activities (laundresses and wayfarers), in the other with a couple in amorous entertainment in the foreground. Old-fashioned paintings, they want to imitate the landscape production of the '700: they were made on ancient canvases, with fake patches on the back. In frames in style.

River Landscape

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower left. Painter, sculptor and architect, Carlo Bonomi, after training at the Brera Academy, opened a studio in Milan together with Carlo Carrà, Giannino Castiglioni and Barilli. His painting is characterized by bright colors - yellow, red and burnt - spread with material substance, as if he sensed a third dimension in painting. He has created works of monumental size, full of figures, seen in their everyday life: humble and industrious people, with deep religious and human motivations. He has never forgotten, on the contrary, he has rather exalted his popular extraction. In this work the artist proposes a large countryside landscape where a river flows, perhaps the Ticino of the places inhabited by the artist: unlike many of his other works, the colors, which prefer the ranges of green, yellow and blue, are spread with broad brushstrokes in soft shades, without contrasts. The work is framed.

Madonna with Child

Oil on plywood. Signed lower right. Born in Milan and trained at the Brera Academy, Giuseppe Ghiringhelli exhibited for the first time in 1900 at the Milan Triennale, and subsequently participated in numerous national exhibitions. He devoted himself mainly to landscape and portrait, but in his production there are also several representations of the sacred Motherhood, depicted, as in this one proposed here, with intense luministic effects and permeated with tenderness and intimacy. The work is presented in a contemporary frame.

Venetian glimpse

Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. Painter, sculptor and ceramist, the Turin artist Giovanni Riva participated in numerous national reviews and exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1940 and 1942. Among his production as a ceramist, the faces of many Lenci dolls are particularly remembered. In painting he devoted himself above all to glimpses of Turin, Milan and Venice, rendered with great spontaneity and immediacy, as well as genre scenes. The systematic study of ancient art, the adherence to the Renaissance ideals of the sculpture of Donatello, Michelangelo and Giambologna pushed Giovanni Riva towards the adoption of an expressive code similar to the taste of the romantic nineteenth century, rather than to futurist dynamism or surrealist visions . The Venetian glimpse proposed here is presented in a style frame.

Composition with Hourglass Armor and Books

Oil on the table. Signed lower right. Born in Milan in 1913 and trained at the Brera Academy (of which he will later become a teacher), Adriano Gajoni became passionate about the study of seventeenth-century Lombard painters and Dutch and Flemish painting of the seventeenth century, from whose meticulous realism he let himself be inspired. Of strict figurative observance, Gajoni preferred landscapes, portraits and above all still lifes, which he expressed in fairy-tale and allegorical compositions. He mainly practiced oil painting on wood and hardboard. This composition proposes an armor, placed on a table together with some illuminated texts and an hourglass. The taste for ancient flavor compositions is rediscovered. In frame.

The Country Road

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower left. Having moved as a child with his family to Milan in 1898, still very young, Raoul Viviani enrolled at the Brera Academy, where he studied under the guidance of Giuseppe Mentessi (1857-1931). At the same time he attended the nude school of the Artistic Family, with which he exhibited for the first time at the age of 17, immediately enjoying great success with the public and critics, as a landscape painter with a strong personality and modernity and for his highly original style characterized from strong chromatic experiments. In 1912 he participated in the Venice Biennale and subsequently participated in numerous national and international exhibitions. From 1926 he began his career in the field of art criticism, writing for various newspapers, but his opposition to fascism led him to choose voluntary exile: in 1931 he moved to Uruguay, where he founded and directed the Academy of Montevideo Fine Arts. Returning to Milan in 1937, he resumed his activity as a painter and as a critic. In the 1950s he moved to Rapallo for health reasons and remained there until his death. Extremely original landscape painter, who engages in oil painting but also in watercolor and engraving, is very close to pointillist painting, however, developing his own personal technique, characterized by very thin filaments of color in the form of thin commas, which define the structures of the its landscapes. With his transfer to Liguria, the Ligurian landscape becomes the protagonist of his works and also his mute technique, moving away from the original pointillism to open up to a broad and summary brushstroke, which finally leads to a production of still lifes from violent and contrasting colors. In this work in which the technical characteristic of Viviani is well appreciated, along the country path that runs along the canal, a figure of a woman appears, which constitutes an exception in his production, usually lacking in figurative elements. Work in frame.

Male face

Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. The Milanese artist Carlo Jacono was an illustrator and painter: his unmistakable style, the mastery in the execution, the prolificacy and artistic ability in over 50 years of career, the knowing how to lend himself to different genres and the great success at readers and publishers made him one of the masters of Italian illustration and one of the most appreciated and well-known names on the national and international illustration scene. He was also known as the "Man of the circle", a pseudonym due to the layout of many of his covers in pink, police, science fiction, Italian, English, Swedish, Norwegian, American (we recall, among many, the covers of the series "Il giallo Mondadori "), or more simply with the surname only, Jacono, with which he signed himself. Starting from 1970 Jacono also embarked on a career as a painter, exhibiting in personal exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, preferring a figurative vein with a romantic connotation that finds its masterpiece in the series of "The warriors". They said of this production: "they are apparitions of warriors of other times, which the imagination comes to realize even in the minute features of the face, and to imagine in the most reckless actions". Probably the painting presented here is also part of this series: it is the face of a Nordic warrior, as can be deduced from the fur headdress that frames the proud and concentrated face in which the cold blue eyes stand out, and from the burnished metal collar engraved with signs graphics that refer to the Nordic runes; half-length, the shoulder straps of the armor can be seen. The painting is presented in a frame.

Portrait of Dr. Libero Mazza 1972

Oil on canvas. Signed and dated lower left. On the back the handwritten "Portrait of Dr. Libero Mazza, prefect of Milan, made in my studio", followed by the artist's further signature and the date. Venetian but Milanese by adoption, Attilio Melo studied at the Brera Academy and together with his father, an appreciated fresco painter. From an early age he established himself as a portraitist; in his long and brilliant career, figures of national and international fame posed for him, from different worlds: politicians (such as De Gasperi, Gronchi) and religious (Cardinal Martini), artists from the world of entertainment, music, theater (Ingrid Bergman, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren ....) and dance (Rudolf Nureyev). He was also a landscape painter, even of foreign places, but always favoring the landscape of his lands of origin and inspiration, Milan and Venice. His style is peculiar, made up of long brushstrokes, almost stripes of color, which create an evocative chromatic setting around the portrayed figures. The painting proposed here is presented in a contemporary frame.

Libeccio

Oil on table. Signed lower right. On the back, further signature, title and cartouche of the Galleria Dedalo in Milan. Giulio Cesare Vinzio, an artist of Livornese origin, artistically trained in Florence, attending the studio of Giovanni Fattori. In the countryside around Florence he begins to paint landscapes from life, with oxen, peasants, horses as protagonists, landscapes of the Maremma, rendered with bright colors and strong chromatic contrasts. From the beginning of the twentieth century, while exhibiting throughout Italy and abroad, he moved to Piedmont and approached pointillist painting: while continuing to prefer rural landscapes and bucolic realities, he represented them in the atmospheres of twilight, nocturnal, dawns, no longer made with broad brushstrokes, but small strokes divided between them. In 1921 he joined the Labronico Group, which brought him closer to the realist naturalism of the origins. The work presented here offers a glimpse of a Maremma beach, beaten by the libeccio, the wind that blows from the south across the Mediterranean. The technique is that of realism, using large and superimposed brush strokes. In frame.

Vase of Flowers 1956

Oil on plywood. Signed and dated lower left. The Piedmontese painter Emilio Vacchetti devoted himself mainly to flower arrangements in vases and landscapes, glimpses of the Piedmontese mountains. The work in warm and shaded colors is presented in a frame