ARTIST: Scipione Simoni (Italian, 1853 - 1918)
NAME: Street Scene, Rome
MEDIUM: watercolor on paper
CONDITION: Minor paint losses along right edge. Some age toning. Framed under glass. Wear to frame.
SIGHT SIZE: 37 x 24 inches / 93 x 60 cm
FRAME SIZE: 46 x 34 inches / 116 x 86 cm
SIGNATURE: lower right
PROVENANCE: Auctioneer Freeman's, Date 2016-01-25, Lot 197
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
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SKU#: 121046
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BIOGRAPHY:
Scipione Simoni was an Italian painter.He was born in Rome, in via Panisperna, from Antonio who was a barber and was originally from Pratica di mare and from Luisa Fabrizi born in Magliano Sabina . He was admitted to the Academy of San Luca when he was only 17, but he always considered his brother Gustavo to be his true teacher. Gustavo was one of the ten founders of the Association of Roman Watercolors and he then attracted his younger brother Scipione to this group.No oil works are known by Scipione Simoni, but only watercolors. With the help of his brother, he exhibited some of them - between 1885 and 1886 and perhaps for the first time - at the Manchester City Art Gallery. In 1890, at the "City of Rome" exhibition he presented the watercolor The Brigands , in costume. He reproduced characteristic corners and narrow streets of Lazio villages, with women spinning in front of the doors or drawing water with the characteristic copper basin , with peasants driving the donkey, with squawking hens on the pavement.Wandering through ancient villages on the hills - Olevano Romano, Subiaco , Cori, Anticoli Corrado - he drew from the everyday life of those places the ideas for delicate, idealized, colorful views. In Munich , in 1892, he exhibited Women at Anticoli Corrado and other pleasant watercolors with vegetable merchants. In Dresden , in 1894, he introduced Strada di Cori - outskirts of Rome . In 1901 he exhibited in Rome, with the Amateurs and Connoisseurs of fine arts, a Glimpse of Palestrina, where you could see a woman on a staircase, with the basin in her head, while another woman, next to a man who smoked a pipe, was intent on planting vegetables contained in a scifa , a typical wooden container obtained from a large branch. Next to it, a hen pecked at the vegetable scraps.In 1903 Scipione Simoni joined the group of Roman watercolor painters and exhibited at the exhibitions organized by this association; but from 1909 the opportunities to exhibit with this Association began to rarefy, due to the competition of other groups of artists who created works of a more modern cut.Scipione Simoni represented the colorful costumes of Lazio women and the ancient urban building fabric, with meticulous care, focusing in particular on the flints of the old streets, on the arches, on the stones and bricks of which the walls were made, on the irregular steps of the stairs . The of him is a late nineteenth-century lyrical realism, expressed with analytical and descriptive scruple, and elevated to the symbol of a simple, happy and industrious humanity. More rare, but of equal decorative impact, in the footsteps of his brother Gustavo who was a successful orientalist, is his production of scenes and characters drawn from a mysterious and dreamed Arab East.