Mother with child in Greek-Albanian costumes (1863)

Signed and dated lower left: “Cesare Dell’Acqua 1863”

A history and genre painter, Cesare Dell’Acqua, in the midst of his professional ascent, after receiving important official recognition in Brussels, where he had moved since 1848, successfully experimented in the early 1860s with the exotic theme, which was very popular at the time. Dell’Acqua’s was not, however, a documentary exoticism, as he never made any exploration or study trips to the lands of the East. If anything, he tried to make use of his experiences from his years in Trieste, where – as a young employee in a shipping company – he had the opportunity to admire the picturesque costumes worn by the merchants from the East who came to the city at the time. He was particularly intrigued by the clothes of the Balkan peoples, especially the Albanian, Montenegrin, Dalmatian and Greek populations.

If travelling sometimes means more verisimilitude than truth, staying at home, without facing the risks and toils of a journey, does not necessarily imply alienation or superficiality of approach. Dell’Acqua does the same in composing his works of oriental and philhellenic genre, where single figures set against a poorly defined landscape or architectural backdrop dominate. The backbone of all these works is the drawing. The general outline is traced in pencil on the support in an essential manner, but always according to a precise and punctual conduct. In addition, the painter repeatedly resorts to the photographic medium in order to correctly depict the individual figures, which are often portrayed frontally or in profile and have their own physiognomy. For these, in particular, he makes use of some prototypes executed from life on which he repeatedly draws to animate the close-ups.

Dell’Acqua makes use here of an entirely personal combinatory technique, which involves the inversion – from left to right, or vice versa – of the figures. This allows him not to fall into the monotony of the scenes described and, at the same time, to evoke moments of life surrounded by an ever-changing reality: the variations in the light, the colour of the atmosphere that changes as the hours of the day and the seasons pass, are different in each of these works, just as there is no repetition, no fall in values, no lesser presence of that professional commitment that ennobles and characterises the work of this Istrian artist.

It can be seen in this unpublished watercolour of 1863 depicting a young mother in Greco-Albanian costume holding her sleeping child. The compositional scheme re-proposes that of a small gouache drawing from the same period, limited however to the female figure only (27.5 x 20 cm; Brussels, private collection. Cf. F. Tossi, Cesare Dell’Acqua 1821-1905. Catalogo generale, Trieste 2021, no. 203, p. 148). A figure that Dell’Acqua also used for the painting Oriental Woman with Turban (fig.1), of which two versions of a similar level are known (cf. F. Tossi, Cesare Dell’Acqua 1821-1905. Catalogo generale, Trieste 2021, nos. 211, 216, pp. 148-149).

Stefano Bosi