Federico Zandomeneghi

Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired directly from the artist)
Angelo Sommaruga, Paris
Private Collection, Milan
Galleria Mainetti, Milan
Private Collection, Milan (acquired from the above, 1976)
Thence by descent

Paris, Durand-Ruel, Exposition des Tableaux, Pastels, Dessins de Federico Zandomeneghi, November 1903, no. 8

V. Pica, "Artisti contemporanei: Federico Zandomeneghi,"  Emporium, vol. LV, no. 327, March 1914, p. 6
Enrico Piceni, Zandomeneghi, Milan, 1967, no. 403
Francesco Dini, Federico Zandomeneghi, la vita e le opere, Florence,  1989, p. 422, no. 103, illustrated and pl. CXVII
Enrico Piceni, Zandomeneghi, (new edition) Maria Grazia Piceni Testi, ed., Busto Arsizio, 1991, no. 403
Camila Testi, Maria Grazia Piceni, Enrico, Piceni, Federico Zandomeneghi, Catalogo generale, nuova edizione aggiornata e ampliata, Milan, 2006, p. 289, no. 398, illustrated

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work is in perfect condition. The canvas is unlined and still on its original stretcher. The work is currently framed behind glass, which is not necessary. The paint layer seems to be clean and no retouches have been added.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Through the 1860s, the Florentine critic Diego Martelli had championed the Italian group of plein-air painters known as the Macchiaioli, who shared the same principles as the French Impressionists and influenced Federico Zandomeneghi’s early landscapes and genre scenes. Fittingly, it was likely Martelli who prompted his friend Zandomeneghi’s trip from his native Venice to Paris in 1874, after enthusiastically reporting on that year’s inaugural Impressionist exhibition. He introduced the artist to Edgar Degas, who proved to be particularly inspiring to “Zandò” (as he came to be known by friends), inviting the Italian to exhibit at the fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth Impressionist exhibitions of 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886 (Ann Dumas, Degas and the Italians in Paris, exh. cat., Royal Scottish Academy, Glasgow, 2004, pp. 19-20). The artist drew the attention of the powerful dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who sponsored three one-man shows for the artist in 1893, 1897, and 1903, where Le crochet hung among  thirty-one other paintings by Zandomeneghi. The gallery then sold Le crochet, as they did with almost all of the artist’s production of the period. 

Le crochet, like many of Zandò’s favorite subjects, captures a scene from the life of a Belle Époque Parisienne. However, while fellow Italian expatriates like Giuseppe de Nittis and Giovanni Boldini favored painting fashionably dressed ladies strolling along the Bois de Boulogne or luxuriating in chicly designed interiors, Zandò generally preferred portraying women and girls observed in the private moments of their everyday life: reading letters, attending to their coiffure, chatting or, as in the present work, absorbed in the intricacies of lace crochet.  While the artist is known for his paintings of young women alone or together, relatively few, like Le crochet portray a mother and child. The pink-bonneted young girl’s deep-blue eyes glance toward her mother’s face and busy hands while the woman remains focused on her task.

Dated 1901, Le crochet expands upon Zandò’s Impressionist experiments and the theme and subjects in his compositions of the period. The cropped perspective of the present work creates an intimate space and demonstrates the Impressionists' appreciation of Japanese prints and photography. Zandò emphasizes the tactility of the woman’s daily activities to create a peaceful mood, and the overlapping forms of the figures points to the familial theme.  The motif may have been influenced by Zandò’s contemporaries and fellow Impressionist exhibitors Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, another foreign artist in Paris who famously shared an association with Degas (fig. 1).  Yet, while Zandò’s working habits and compositional choices linked him to the Impressionists, works like Le crochet are specific to him and his Italian heritage.  His compositions earned him the additional nickname of “Le vénitien”, stemming from his luminous yet subtle use of color, which recalls the work of the Macchiaioli, and points toward the Italian Divisonists and Symbolists (Dumas, p. 21). Just as with his celebrated pastels of the late nineteenth century, the present work demonstrates Zandò’s use of dabs and dashes of paint to enhance the scene: the landscape's decorative pattern of shifting greens and pops of red; glints of gold sparkle across a wedding band; intertwined yellows and subtle blues along the wicker arm chair suggest the shadows cast by the sun. 

While revealing the influence of his contemporaries, Le crochet evidences Zandò’s unique talent and perfectly illustrates his recollection that “looking, listening, arguing, I was transformed like all other artists, from Pissarro to Degas, from Manet to Renoir; my artistic life was a series of infinite evolutions that cannot be analyzed, that cannot be explained… As for my technique, a very vague term, the one I used was my own, I did not borrow from anyone (as quoted in Piceni, 1991, p. 60).