Giuseppe Ferrari (Rome 1843-Rieti 1905) “The red-haired Woman” Portrait

“The red-haired woman “oil on canvas, bears an inscription on the frame “Painted by Giuseppe Ferrari – Rome”.

Giuseppe Ferrari (Rome, 21 December 1843 – Rieti, 4 August 1905) was an Italian painter.
In 1863 he enrolled at the Accademia di San Luca, becoming a pupil of the portraitist Alessandro Marini. Of a meditative nature, to the urban views of Rome – where he settled, working in the studios in via Margutta, n. 55, and via Flaminia, n. 44-he preferred the wide spaces of the English and Roman countryside, the desert and the landscapes of Tunisia and Palestine which, in the mid-seventies, he visited, remaining fascinated by the grandeur and tragic solitude that, in a different way, these places they expressed. From his travels in Africa and the East he brought back numerous sketches and sketches, translated into large-scale canvases that are affected by the blinding light of those places. Ferrari combined his interest in landscapes with an interest in portraits, the genre for which he is best known: a good number of students gathered around him, including many female painters, where the main pictorial genre investigated was the portrait, of which Ferrari was now considered one of the best exponents of the Roman nineteenth century.

In 1877 he exhibited A Street in Tunis at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Introduced by P. Tosti, a true patron of Italian artists abroad, in England he was attracted by J. M. W. Turner’s research into light and atmosphere and by J. Constable’s naturalism.

He participated in the main exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

Alongside painters such as N. Costa, V. Cabianca and E. Coleman, he joined the innovative demands of the “In arte libertas” group, in an attempt to oppose the academicism of the capital.
In 1904 he was among the founders of the XXV group of the Roman Campagna together with Coleman, O. Carlandi and others, participating in the deepening of luministic research in authentic pictorial campaigns in the vicinity of Rome.

Our portrait is probably similar to Ferrari’s works: created in one go, without a background to the point of apparently appearing like a sketch, it masterfully captures on the canvas the sulky expression of the girl portrayed, who seems almost annoyed by the painter’s gaze. Introspective and innovative, his style differs from the academicism of the end of the century and already suffers from a strong influence of modernity.

Measure
Canvas cm 63 x 49
Frame cm 80 x 66