Popular Scene, Circa 1770 - Pietro Fabris (1740 To 1792)

PIETRO FABRIS (lived in Naples from 1756 to 1792). "Popular Scene", circa 1770. Oil on canvas. Certificate. Dimensions: 116 x 94 cm; 152 x 126 cm (frame). The work is accompanied by a study by Professor Stefano Causa, available upon request. With this magnificent popular scene of impressive size, Pietro Fabris follows in the footsteps of the "Bamboccianti", genre painters active in Rome from around 1625 to the end of the 17th century, who created small cabinet pictures or engravings of the daily life of the lower classes of Rome and its countryside. These artists, mainly Dutch and Flemish, brought with them to Italy the traditions of depicting peasant subjects from 16th-century Dutch art. Despite their modest subject matter, the works were appreciated by elite collectors and achieved high prices. As Stefano Causa, an expert on the artist, states about the work up for auction: "This dazzling popular scene, which takes place outdoors in the shadow of a ruined arch at the entrance to an unidentified village, constitutes a precious piece to better map the chapter of "Neapolitan" Vedutism of the second half of the 18th century." Causa goes on to say that the work we are now presenting can be catalogued as a mature work realized in the best moment of the Anglo-Neapolitan painter, comparable to important works of his production such as the pair of canvases with scenes of popular life, set in a cave in Posillipo and selling watermelons in the port, already on the English market and which, signed and dated 1656 and 1657, are the oldest trace of the painter's Neapolitan work). He also claims that it can be compared to "Tarantella on the Bottom of the Bay of Naples," a piece that comes from the collection of Maurizio and Isabella Alisio and is currently housed in the collections of the Museum of San Martino. Causa defines the work as a fresh and lively scene created by a very light palette, bathed in the light of a southern afternoon. The multiple figures distributed on different planes accentuate the popular character of the scene: "from the young woman with a promising décolletage holding a spinning wheel, to the young men in caps, one of whom is barefoot, engaged in a game of blackberry on a barrel (on which, represented in a few brushstrokes, is the cat). Further to the right, two small dogs, one of which wears a collar, stand apart, drawing our attention to the center of the page where, in the background, a man and a woman mounted on a mule are drinking." Two talkative children, one of whom is protecting himself with a tambourine, skillfully introduce the opposite corner of the painting, full of annotations where, with the mother on her back nursing her child, they are accompanied by peasants and animals (depicted with a precision of contours not unworthy of the best Jacob Phillip Hackert),” concludes Causa. Although we know few biographical details about this artist, we do know that he was an Italian painter active in England and Naples in the second half of the 18th century. He made for Sir William Hamilton, a diplomat and amateur geologist, a series of engravings based on his paintings depicting contemporary volcanic activity, compiled in two books, Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, &c. (London, 1774) and Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies (Naples, 1776). Under Hamilton's patronage, he also produced visual reproductions during his excursions to the volcanic sites of Etna, Vesuvius, and the Lipari Islands. His paintings and drawings were exhibited in 1768 at the Free Society of London and in 1772 at the Society of Artists of Great Britain in London.