Seated Boy

With the outbreak of World War II, Filippo de Pisis returned to Italy from Paris, where he had resided since 1925. "Seated Boy" is realized in correspondence of his return and reveals the importance of Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse, whose example is visible in the moving and vibrant atmospheres, in the bright chromatic contrasts and in the "shock" rendered in the character by the treatment of the sign. In these tragic years, de Pisis’s painting reveals an urgent need to paint almost unbridled, emphasized by the restlessness of the war period and the appearance of the first symptoms of nervous disease that will be fatal and that intensifies the dark and rarefied directions of his visual language.