Portrait of Francesca Meraviglia Bosi

Francesca Meraviglia (1872-1938), comes from a wealthy family in the Varese area (her father was a silk merchant), Lady of San Vincenzo, Visitor of the Hospital, volunteer nurse of the Red Cross during the First World War and then during the epidemic of "Spanish", she marries Giuseppe Bosi, belonging to another very rich family of the area, who even suspends his engineering studies to devote himself to the administration of family assets. Francesca inherits a conspicuous patrimony from an uncle, textile industrialist, who entirely devotes to the construction of an Infantile Kindergarten named after him in Castelletto di Cuggiono. Widow and childless, in the will she appoints the universal heir of his great fortune (4 million lire) the Ospedale Maggiore, foreseeing that the villa of Ossona (Milan), of his property, was adapted to convalescenziario for children, asking the commemorative portrait also of her husband and arranging many other legacies. Attending the hospital as a volunteer, she realized the great difficulty that the patients encountered when they were discharged because they were no longer acute, but still in need of treatment. Once completed, the villa can host up to sixty children. The executor suggests for the portrait the name of Giannino Grossi, better known and appreciated as an author of Milanese views than as a portraitist; in fact the Artistic Commission finds in the painting "lack of true artistic inspiration". The picture is actually set in an academic manner, in a late nineteenth-century style. The portrait is "en pendant" with that of her husband.