Paesaggio a Creys - Antonio Fontanesi

(Reggio nell'Emilia 1818 - Torino 1882)
Cm 27x37 | In 10.63x14.57
Oil on panel
He was born in Reggio Emilia, February 23, 1818, penultimate of seven siblings, to Giuseppe, a barracks guard, and Maddalena Gabbi. His very disadvantaged youth, tried by misery, marked all his work with a melancholic and idealistic vein. At the age of fourteen, in 1832, He enrolled in the municipal school of fine arts in Reggio where he was immediately well-liked by Professor P. Minghetti, who supported and encouraged him even after his studies. At the age of sixteen he turned out first tied for the landscape prize. His conversion to landscape paintings was as natural as it was rapid, influenced also by the political events in which he was involved and which forced him into exile in Turin, Lugano, Geneva, and frequent trips to France where he was able to assimilate the great ferment that gravitated around art. In 1869 he was a teacher of landscape at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, which he left, following envy and misunderstandings, to undertake a two-year teaching experience at the Tokyo Academy. He returned to his old post in Turin in 1878 and remained there, in financial straits, living on Via Po in the Palazzo Accorsi, until his death on April 17, 1882. He is buried in Turin's Monumental Cemetery, while a plaque in the hallway of the Accorsi-Cometto Museum commemorates him. In 1901 the Venice Biennial paid him the tribute of a major exhibition of paintings, while in more recent years a number of initiatives by the National Chalcography and the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, which have also rightly re-evaluated his engravings, which were technically perfect and among the best produced in Italy in the 19th century. Although he is probably one of the greatest Italian painters of the 19th century, he has long remained unknown to the general public and has been little considered by critics, except for the interest of some great artists such as Carlo Carrà. Of romantic temperament, in his landscapes, rich in intimist notations and characterized by a melancholic atmosphere, he expressed an extraordinary evocative ability, influenced by direct knowledge of the works of Corot and the Barbizonniers on the one hand and Constable and Turner on the other.