Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Vincenzo Gemito
Naples 1852 - 1929
40
Portrait of a Boy
Point of the brush and watercolour and gouache over black chalk, with plentiful white heightening. Signed,
inscribed and dated: V. Gemito/1915/ Genazzano.
274 x 186 mm (10 ½ x 7 ¼ in.)
Provenance: Private Collection, Florence.
Vincenzo Gemito holds a unique position in Italian
art of the turn of the 19 th and 20 th centuries; broadly
famous as a sculptor he was also a draughtsman of
exceptional brilliance. Mostly self-taught, his sculptures,
both in terms of quality and technique belong,
nevertheless, to the tradition of classical statuary and
the great Renaissance masters and are characterised
by a fusion of naturalism and grace. Rebellious and independent
by nature, he also had a voracious appetite
for culture and learning. Gemito was abandoned as a
child, left on the doorstep of a Foundling Hospital in
Naples. At the age of 9, he pleaded with a local sculptor
to be allowed into the workshop as an apprentice,
using the churches of Naples as museums in which
he could absorb the work of the 17 th and 18 th Century
painters and the Museo Arcologico as his greatest
source for learning.
Gemito’s first success came at the age of 16 when he
sold a sculpture to the King of Italy, Vittorio Emmanuele
II. Ten years later, he moved to Paris, where he
met Giovanni Boldini (who lent him money) and made
particular friends with Ernest Meissonier. He began
exhibiting at the Paris Salons, winning the Grand Prix
in 1889. Gemito returned to Naples in 1880 whilst
continuing to send work to Paris, but from 1887 he
suffered bouts of mental illness and increasingly and
for most of the next twenty years, limited himself to
drawing. He spent almost a year on Capri, his chief
model being his wife, Anna Cutolo.
Drawing was at the heart of his realistic and detailed
approach to sculpture and over time, he produced an
enormous number of figure and portrait studies in various
media: pen, chalk, pastel and watercolour and
sometimes a combination of all of these. His work on
paper was often the structure on which his sculptures
were based but his drawings are also of exceptional
aesthetic quality in their own right 1 .
The present work, dating from 1915, has a specific
medium common to a small number of other beautiful
portrait heads dating to around the same period, some
of which Gemito made during the second half of the
year while he was living in Gennazzano, a small hilltop
town outside of Rome. The painterly use of white
heightening, strong ink, and the colours red and blue
are at once striking and harmonious and can be seen
again in a profile portrait of a young girl with a headscarf
dating from the same moment and with the same
inscription, Genazzano 2 , as well as in a fine depiction
of a Young Woman with an Urn dating from 1913 4 .
Gemito is known to have spent six months in Genazzano
resting, away from the demands of the city, but
still intensely active and taking inspiration from the
young people of the town whom he drew with sympathy
and tenderness. Another study of a young boy, possibly
even the same depicted here, is in the Mazzotta
collection; it is drawn in pen and ink only, just with
touches of white heightening and has the inscription:
Genazzano and the specific date: 27 Agosto 3 .
150