Rubens Santoro

MacConnal-Mason & Son, London
Private collection
Sale: Christie's, London, 15 March 1996, lot 161
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Rubens Santoro is most often recognized for his depictions of Venice's majestic structures on the Grand Canal but sometimes turned a more intimate eye to its less-traveled waterways. These quieter neighborhoods afforded him the opportunity to develop a new visual vocabulary of Venetian daily 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.