My favourite Favretto
A piece that would like to have a moment of your time, if you don’t mind, “The Painter” by Giacomo Favretto was up for sale in June in Milan. Sotheby’s was hoping to get as much as €25,000 for it, but I don’t know how they made out.
There’s not a lot to be discovered about Favretto online, despite the fact that he’s got his own website, which is pretty good considering he’s been dead for 121 years. Neither his site nor Wikipedia Italy have much to say about him, though, and the few images of his paintings on offer aren’t large or particularly well reproduced.
He was Venetian, born 1849, died 1887. Some of his paintings are strikingly photographic without even trying to be realistic, a trick of colour and texture. In “The Painter”, the question is, “What is he painting?” Was Favretto deliberately invoking cave art?
References to him keep mentioning his “Anatomy Lesson” as some sort of key work, but I haven’t been granted a good enough look at it to make a call. These others are nice, though: “Portrait of a Relation of the Artist” and, below, “The Artist’s Father and Sister — My Beloved”. A real family man!
