The Rose

This painting portrays Emilia Dal Col, the amateur painter who became Luigi Conconi’s wife in 1897.The genre of the female portrait predominates in the artist’s oeuvre and in inventing extremely original poses and settings he often involved his wife, who was his favourite model. The face of Emilia is recognisable in Confidences, (1898, Lugano, Museo Civico di Belle Arti) and in the more intimate Portrait of my Wife (c. 1905, private collection), where the half-bust pose of the young woman, is reminiscent of the painting in the Collection. Here Conconi adds a rose which her fingers are lightly touching, an element that also recurs in Portrait of Ada Valdata (1907, Genoa, Frugone Collections and in Portrait of a Girl (c. 1915, Milan, Archivio Storico Campari), both commissioned by members of the Milanese middle class. Emilia’s hairstyle and dress, however, bring The Rose closer to the date of the later portrait of Rita Maggioni (c. 1913–1915, private collection) thus permitting us to date the canvas in the Collection to the first half of the 1910s. Even in this more mature period, Conconi stills returns to a style of painting linked to his youthful researches conducted within the ambit of the Scapigliatura movement.