Ettore Tito

Arrived very early in Venice from his native Naples Ettore Tito he entered the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of Pompeo Marino Molmenti. Since its beginnings in the sign of Giacomo Favretto, curious anecdote for your attention, and Mariano Fortuny, in the fluency of the pictorial sign, Tito soon outdistanced by updating the local tradition of the eighteenth century Venetian personal stylistic freshness and by deriving a hitherto unusual.

From here a number of national and international successes, which began with the acquisition by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome La old fish market in Venice in 1887 and culminated with the gold medal at the International Exhibition of Paris of 1900s. With deposition in 1911 won another important award that allowed him to sell this at the Museum of Buenos Aires and at the same time to open up important business contacts with the Argentine thriving collectors’ market.

The painting here examined, signed and dated lower right “E.Tito 915” represents a tranche de vie of daily work, the transport of hay, taken at the height of physical effort. To underline the absence of any moralistic tone or irony in the story of the daily works of the kind of Tito that unfolds all its technical ability to simply return a frank realism of post-Impressionist master. The work is a second version of a work carried out some years ago, the Harvest of hay in Asiago in 1911 exposed by Stefani in Buenos Aires in the same year and then sold to the collector Don Lorenzo Pellerano.

Compared to the previous drafting the work in question has some variants which are not relevant, such as the absence of the house in the background on the right and yield the estimate of the fence at the center of the composition.

It is basically a replica of a subject who received some success – so as to have been the teacher in an exhibition of oltroceano – performed four years after the first version as a hypothesis in Rome where the painter resided continuously from the fact from 1915 to 1919. With this in mind it is no coincidence that the work, unpublished, comes from a private collection in Rome, the city where it is likely to have been preserved since his execution.