Portrait of a Lady

This painting was shown for the first time at the 5th Esposizione Internazionale di Belle Arti di Venezia in 1903. The identity of the sitter, whom the artist painted on various occasions, is not known. Wearing an elegant black dress, with her hair gathered up leaving her neck and shoulders bare, the figure is portrayed looking down in a studied pose, her face turned away from the viewer. Few tones are used in this large canvas, namely the greys of the background and the black of the dress, against which the woman’s pale complexion stands out, enhanced by the light coming from the left. This portrait reveals a strong naturalistic influence directly derived from the models of Cesare Tallone and is similar to the female portraits executed in the same period by Adolfo Feragutti Visconti, with which it shares the low angle, slightly oblique framing and the loose, soft brushwork. At the turn of the century and then during the climate of the Belle Epoque, portrait painting evolved further – it increasingly became a status symbol of the Lombard bourgeoise – to become a modern artistic genre that gradually rejected the models of Romantic painting and the style of the late Scapigliatura movement.