Antonio Mancini

Background

Antonio Mancini was born on November 14, 1852, in Rome, Italy. He revealed his artistic talent at an early age.

Education

A twelve-year-old boy, Antonio Mancini became a student of the Naples Academy of Fine Arts. He had been taught there for nine years by a history painter and adherent of chiaroscuro Domenico Morelli as well as by Filippo Palizzi.

Career

Antonio Mancini started his artistic career in 1872 when he presented two of his works at the Paris Salon. A year later, he rented a studio in Naples with his friend Vincenzo Gemito.

In 1876, the artist exhibited at his next Paris Salon with his artwork “The Poor Schoolboy”.

Later, Mancini travelled to the capital of France where he met impressionists Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, as well as the portraitist John Singer Sargent who became his friend, supporter and somehow promoter among gallery owners and collectors.

At the beginning of the 1880s, the painter had some problems with mental health. He settled down in Frascati in 1883 and had lived there for thirty-five years. It was a period of poverty for the artist supported financially by his friends and colleagues. Soon, the period ended – Mancini signed a contract with a Dutch art collector Hendrik Willem Mesdag.

At the end of the First World War, the situation of the Antonio Mancini’s career became stable again.

Achievements

• Antonio Mancini was a prolific and talented impressionist whose masterpieces are nowadays preserved in various prestigious Italian galleries and museums, including Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Turin and National Gallery of the Modern Arts in Rome. Fifteen oil paintings and three pastels by Mancini are in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art where in 2007 was organized the first exhibition dedicated to Antonio Mancini on the territory of the United States.
  
  Some of the artist's paintings are sold at the auctions, in particular, A young violinist was bought at Tajan 'Old Master Paintings' in 2013 for $471,478.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Ariana Wormeley Curtis

  • Self-­portrait

  • The Customs

  • Italian Town View

  • Girl with a White Veil

  • The Saltimbanco

  • Portrait of a Young Boy

  • Almond Blossoms

  • Seated Boy

  • Children on a Sunny Beach

  • Two Dolls

  • Portrait of Elizabeth and Charles Williamson with their Pet Dog

  • Boy with Toy Soldiers

  • A Young Girl Laughing

  • Woman with an Album

  • Self-Portrait

  • A Portrait of the Artist's Father

  • Old Woman Drinking Tea

  • The Little Seminarian

  • Portrait of a Child

  • In the Boudoir

  • After the Duel

  • Neapolitan Street Urchin with Umbrella

  • Aurelia

  • Portrait of Luigino Gianchetti, Holding a Violin

  • Boy with Guitar

  • Still Life with Apple and Grapes

  • Child Reading

  • Italian Woman in a Straw Hat

  • The Fortune Teller

Views

Quotations: "The sun sets, man dies. It is right. But what a pity not to be able to paint any more."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "His paintings were done through a wire grille, whose squares correspond with a grille before the sitter. The marks of the grille remain. The sitter being, as it were, pinned down, retained of his mobility alone the facial expression. But, trembling and snorting within that restriction, there is an extraordinary vivacity, there is power and a dashing impasto." Walter Richard Sickert, an English painter and printmaker

Connections

Friend:

Vincenzo Gemito

Friend:

John Singer Sargent

teacher:

Dominico Morelli

teacher:

Filippo Palizzi

References

• The Macchiaioli : Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century
  1988
• Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master
  2007