Rubens Santoro

James Elverson, Jr
His sale: American Art Association, Anderson Galleries, 30 January 1930, lot 6

While Rubens Santoro is most often recognized for his depictions of the city’s most majestic structures on the Grand Canal, he sometimes turned a more intimate eye onto quieter streets and less-traveled waterways. These overlooked neighborhoods afforded him the opportunity to develop a new visual vocabulary of daily Venetian life: sheets drying in the breeze; open shudders; subtle earth tones of crumbling building plasters; humble gondolas; and passing pedestrians. This is the Venice of the Venetians, who live every day amongst the magic of the city—unseen by many, yet sensitively recorded by Santoro’s brush.

Santoro was a pupil of Domenico Morelli at the Academy of fine art in Naples. He exhibited in Naples, Turin, Venice, Rome and abroad including London and at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris where he received an honorable mention in 1896. He specialized almost exclusively in quotidian scenes of Venice.