Guglielmo Ciardi

Private collection, USA;

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 22 May 1997, lot 143 (for $321,500);

Where purchased by the present owner.

G.L. Marini (ed.), Il valore dei dipinti italiani dell’Ottocento e del primo Novecento, Turin 1998, p. 191;

Ottocento. Catalogo dell’arte italiana dell’Ottocento, issue no. 27, Milan 1998, p. 105;

N. Stringa, E. Bassi and L. Menegazzi, Guglielmo Ciardi. Catalogo generale die dipinti, Regione del Veneto 2007, p. 309, no. 428, reproduced.

Dating from circa 1890, this monumental landscape is both a celebration of the countryside around Treviso in the Veneto, and a tour de force of plein air painting. It is the largest of four versions of the same view Ciardi made on the banks of the Sile, the inspiration and subject of over thirty oils of this river close to the artist's home in the commune of Quinto di Treviso. The sense of the outdoors, the observation of light and shadow, and the scintillating palette, epitomise the new freer, more impressionistic style of painting permeating Italy in different forms at this time. In Ciardi’s paintings of this period, 'the feeling for nature has overcome the rigorous geometry and the handling has become comparatively impulsive, in the suggestive juxtaposition of transparent glazes and the use of the palette knife – by turns resistant and rigid as well as soft and crumbling – in an altogether altered approach to colour, and a more improvised conception of pictorial structure.' (A. Baboni, Masterpieces of Nineteenth Century Italian Painting from the Gaetano Marzotto Collection, exh. cat., Parma 1994, p. 71).

Ciardi studied at the Venice Academy under Federico Moja and Domenico Bresolin, receiving a rigorous academic training which was reflected in his early work. In 1868, fellow Venetian artist Federico Zandomeneghi introduced him to Telemaco Signorini, a leading figure of the Macchiaioli group in Florence. Ciardi’s contact with them marked a transformation on his artistic approach as he espoused their naturalistic style predicated on painting in plein air. Later, in Naples, he came into contact with the Divisionist paintings of Angelo Morbelli and Filippo Palizzi, and with the Resina school of Realist painters. Together with his contemporaries Giacomo Favretto and Luigi Nono, Ciardi is credited with introducing these new ideas to Venetian painting and applying them to local subjects. In Ciardi’s case, he remained true to local subjects, focusing on views of Venice and its lagoon, and on the countryside and mountains of the Veneto. His children, Emma and Beppe, became successful artists, their Veneto subjects and painterly style very much influenced by their father’s.