Vittorio Matteo Corcos

Federico Gussoni, Milan (until 1934)
R. Baldessari, Milan
Sale: Sotheby's, London, March 26, 1997, lot 73, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale

Venice, XIX Biennale 1934 XII Venezia, no. 306(lent by R. Baldessari)
Livorno, Museo Civico "G. Fattori"; Florence, Galleria d'arte modena, Palazzo Pitti, Vittorio Corcos, Il fantasma e il fiore, June 26-October 12, 1997, no. 15 (as Ritratto di signora)

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.:This painting has been restored and is in lovely condition. The canvas is lined. The paint layer is clean but certainly not abraded or weakened. The eye on the left may have been very slightly strengthened. There is a thin “L” shaped break in the canvas in the tree in the upper right that runs about 6 inches. It has been well restored. There is a small retouch above the hat and another in the iron grille work on the center right. There is a restoration beneath the bow of the dog in the lower right, and a small retouch in her hip on the left side. There are two other small retouches above the signature in the lower left. The condition is certainly particularly good for a work of this scale.
"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."

While Vittorio Corcos enjoyed wide artistic acclaim and great financial success in his lifetime, his contributions to art during the Belle Époque remain somewhat overlooked outside of his native Italy. He had a reputation for being the "peintres des jolies femmes" (a moniker given to him by The Times correspondent Henri De Blowitz that followed him for his entire career), but he also produced an idiosyncratic body of work which includes psychologically rich interpretations of the world and people around him.

Born into a Jewish family of the Italian port city of Livorno, Corcos showed his aptitude as an artist from a young age. At sixteen he was admitted into an advanced position at Florence’s Academia di Belle Arti, followed by study in Naples with the artist Domenico Morelli, who encouraged his move to Paris in 1880. Upon arriving in Paris, Corcos quickly introduced himself to the Italian expatriate artists Giuseppe de Nittis and Giovanni Boldini. Both artists would influence Corcos greatly, and De Nittis hosted regular salons which allowed Corcos to meet such luminaries as Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte and, perhaps most consequentially, his dealer, Adolphe Goupil.

Goupil was a savvy commercial enterprise, and decorative prints and paintings of enticing young women was one of their specialties. In a recent review of the Corcos retrospective at the Palazzo Zabarella in Padua, Roderick Conway Morris writes that the artist's "technical skills in reproducing luxurious women’s fashions and the milky-white and subtly blushing complexions of the young ladies wearing them made him an ideal supplier… Corcos was also adept at infusing these paintings with a fresh-faced sexuality without exceeding the bounds of bourgeois decorum, and Goupil admiringly described him as a painter who was ‘chastely impure’” (Morris, “A Reassessment of Corcos, Sensuality and Subtlety Intact,” New York Times, October 7, 2014).

By 1887, the year the present work was painted, Corcos had returned to Italy with an established reputation and a Parisian dealer, and he converted to Catholicism to marry Emma Ciabatti. While Corcos was primarily concerned with conveying an image of contemporary female beauty, elements of symbolism begin to emerge when he is working in Italy. In the present work, a nearly life sized, elegant, veiled lady confronts the viewer, dressed spectacularly in black. With the enormous door behind her and the park-like vista beyond, she is both inside and in public simultaneously. Corcos has intentionally created an intimate engagement between his sitter and the viewer, a private moment of which the dog and the ladies in the distance are unaware.