Portrait of Rachele (Lina) Biffi Hajech

Mrs. Rachele (Rachelina, known as Lina) Biffi, born into a patriotic family that had intensely engaged in the Risorgimento, and daughter of a doctor of law and prefecture counselor with a passion for literature and writing, widow of Dr. Camillo Hajech , distinguished pediatric doctor of the Ospedale Maggiore and son of the homonymous physicist, engineer and scientist of the same name from Prague, still benefits from the Ca 'Granda in memory of her husband with a donation of 100,000 lire, to which she adds a similar figure, reserving a usufruct, for the construction of the new Pediatric Pavilion: she offers to provide at her own expense, through her trusted artists, the execution of the two full-length portraits. In December 1934 the Artistic Commission of the Hospital ratified the commission of the portrait of the benefactor to Giuseppe Amisani and that of her husband to Eugenia Majocchi Bosone. The painting, executed from life, portrays the benefactor (who said of herself that she had nothing to tell about her life, but that she dedicated herself only to the house and her beloved flowers), in a widow's dress, wrapped in a stole of petis-gris, sitting on an armchair in the eighteenth-century living room of her home, describing both the home and the elderly lady in soft and warm tones. The realism of the image, which repeats nineteenth-century Lombard models, is certainly to refer to the taste of the client, who thus in a certain sense "sacrificed" the free expression of the artist's pictorial manner (which performs as many as 14 portraits for the Quadreria hospital).