Rapporto Annuale 2012 - Palazzo Strozzi

The exhibition was divided into five sections with works by over thirty Americans artists who worked in
Florence. Some, like John Singer Sargent, are famous, while the work of other less well-known artists
is was shown in Italy for the first time. On returning home, they all became celebrated painters and
authoritative masters who played a crucial role in forming the new generation of American painters
and in forging the birth of a national school of painting. Their paintings were placed alongside those by
Florentine and Tuscan painters including Telemaco Signorini, Vittorio Corcos and Michele Gordigiani,
whose work came closest to the sophisticated manner, so rich in literary allusions, that was favoured
and nurtured by the most exclusive circles in that cosmopolitan colony.
The exhibition – sponsored by the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze as well as Bank of America
Merrill Lynch, Terra Foundation for American Art, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Farrow and Paulson
Family Foundation – began with Sargent’s The Hotel Room, typical of the Americans’ first encounter
with the city, involving an inevitable stay in a hotel in the centre to give them the time to explore
and look for somewhere more appropriate to stay, far from the din, the poverty and the filth of the
metropolis. Henry James, an illustrious American writer of the same generation, describes Florence as
lethargically overlooking its sluggish green river, as in Lorenzo Gelati’s painting View of Florence with
Washing hanging out to dry, “basking” in its decadent beauty, brimming with that atmosphere of the
past which James and other Americans were aware was so lacking in their own country. Similarly, the
market place, as shown in Telemaco Signorini’s painting, was a discovery for the Americans, with its
hubbub, colours, smells and dirt, not to mention the threat represented by beggars and pickpockets.
The aim of these painters and their intellectual friends was to take up residence just outside Florence,
in a villa in the hills, such as the village of Batelli in View of Piagentina painted by Silvestro Lega, then in
a country setting that has been totally swallowed up by the expanding city today.
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