Pensive Model, 1875

oil on panel

15 x 16 cm

Signed and dated top left 'CCC 1875'.

Dedicated with monogram at top right

Charles Coleman Caryl, an American artist of Italian origin, was born in Buffalo in 1840. While still very young, he studied painting under William Holbrook Beard, but in 1856, he moved to Paris, where he was a pupil of Thomas Couture.

Returning to the United States in the 1860s to take part in the War of Secession, Coleman opened a studio in New York and exhibited regularly at the Boston Athenaeum and the Brooklyn Art Academy.

In 1867, he moved to Italy, where he began to frequent the colony of foreign artists, including William Graham, Frederic Leighton, Elihu Vedder, and Thomas Hotchkiss, all linked to Nino Costa and thus to the Symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite fascination that had spread in Rome with the Golden Club.

Soon, Charles Coleman Caryl, who was staying in the flat where John Keats had lived in Piazza di Spagna, became one of the most popular artists of the foreign circle and the Aesthetic movement.

Combining the Gothic and Renaissance revival with an extremely light and suspended painting style, executed mainly in watercolour and pastel, he is a refined and elegant interpreter of historical reconstructions, such as the Lute Player (of which this one presented here is the model), but he is best known for his still lifes of flowers and blossoms that link him to Japanese painting.

His delicate floral decorative panels, dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, are criss-crossed with soft flowering branches with white and pink buds, impalpably crafted and with Pre-Raphaelite suggestions. The Orientalism of these compositions is clearly visible in his choice of vases and decorations of Japanese or Middle Eastern carpets and objects, which also testify to his activity as a collector.

Around 1885, Charles Coleman Caryl decided to move to Capri. He used the guest quarters of Villa Narciso as his home studio, where he began to devote himself to luminous views and scenes set in the splendid setting of Capri.

In 1897, he took part in the Venice Biennale. In 1911, he was at the International Exhibition in Rome with First Moonbeams - Capri. He remained on the island until the end of his days, which came in 1928, at the age of eighty-eight.