Portrait of Irene Orsi Rapetti

Irene Orsi (1877-1964) is the widow by the painter Camillo Rapetti, a renowned artist at the Accademia di Brera, who works in different techniques and works hard for the Congregation of Charity, the Institute of the Blind and, of course, for the Ospedale Maggiore, not only as a portrait painter, but as a fresco painter, as he paints the vault and the presbytery of the hospital church. In 1930, the year after her husband's death, Irene donated the cartoons of the frescoes and about sixty works, including oil paintings, watercolors and drawings, which should have been collected in a small room dedicated to him in the hospital museum, which together with a bronze bust created by Giannino Castiglioni he thought of setting up. In 1938 he still had a sum of 50,000 lire in favor of the Ca 'Granda in addition to his own land in Bonassola (La Spezia), asking that the present pastel portrait, which depicts her, be placed in the museum room dedicated to her husband. Roberto Haardt performed it in 1913, at the time he was a twenty-year-old pupil of Rapetti, who later on change over informal art.