Pasquale Celommi | A good catch, 1895

Pasquale Celommi (1851-1928) was an Italian painter, known for his outdoor scenes of Italian life in verist style.

Born in Montepagano, Abruzzo, Italy, he developed a keen eye for detail and depicted everyday life with a captivating realism.

Thanks to the help of a local landowner, Don Camillo Mezzopreti, and to a contribution of 30 lire by the Municipality, he managed to study until the year 1873, when he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.

Pasquale Celommi | Verist painter

Pasquale Celommi (1851-1928) was born in Montepagano - Italy, into a family of fishermen.

Celommi showed an early interest in art and often drew in his home as a child.

Celommi decided to receive academic training and moved Florence to study under Antonio Ciseri at the Academy of Florence.

He was a strong student and often praised by his teacher Ciseri. Celommi started exhibiting his work in various regions of Italy.

Celommi had a large exhibition in Turin and eventually in Rome.

Firmin Baes | A Master of Pastel painting

Firmin Baes (1874-1943) was a Belgian painter.

The son of the decorative painter Henri Baes, Firmin Baes was active as a portrait painter and a painter of still life subjects, figures, landscapes and interiors.

He studied under Léon Frédéric at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels between 1888-1894, and the elder artist’s influence is evident in many of Baes’s early paintings.

Pasquale Celommi | Four Seasons / Le Quattro stagioni, 1890-1901

In the series of the "Four Seasons", commissioned to Pasquale Celommi by the Commander Pasquale Ventilj, the pastoral world is reproposed through rustic "types” who reveal themselves rather self-conscious if compared to the more dramatic scenes of the same country artist Teofilo Patini.

The Four Seasons are part of the collection of the The Pinacoteca Civica of Teramo.

Pasquale Celommi | Winter / Inverno, 1890-1900 | Pinacoteca di Teramo

Gaetano Bellei | Academic / Genre painter

The Italian master Gaetano Bellei was born in Modena in 1857, died in the same city in March 1922.

A student of Adeodato Malatesta and companion of John Muzzioli.

Twenty-four he won the Retired Potetti that allowed him to travel to Rome for some time learning about yourself.

John Frederick Lewis | Orientalist painter

John Frederick Lewis RA (London, 1804-1876) was an British painter. He specialized in Oriental and Mediterranean scenes in exquisitely detailed watercolour or oils.

Lewis lived for several years in a traditional mansion in Cairo, and (after his return to England) painted highly detailed works showing both realistic Genre scenes of Middle Eastern life and more idealized scenes in upper class Egyptian interiors with no traces of Western cultural influence yet apparent.

Constant Troyon | The Barbizon school of painters

Constant Troyon (1810-1865), French painter, was born in Sèvres, near Paris, where his father was connected with the famous manufactory of porcelain.

Troyon was an animal painter of the first rank, and was closely associated with the artists who painted around Barbizon.

The technical qualities of his methods of painting are most masterly; his drawing is excellent, and his composition always interesting.

It was only comparatively late in life that Troyon found his métier, but when he realized his power of painting animals he produced a fairly large number of good pictures in a few years.

Gerard ter Borch | Baroque painter

Gerard Terborch, Terborch also spelled Ter Borch or Terburg (1617-1681), Dutch Baroque painter who developed his own distinctive type of interior genre in which he depicted with grace and fidelity the atmosphere of well-to-do, middle-class life in 17th-century Holland.

Terborch’s father had been an artist and had visited Rome but from 1621 was employed as a tax collector.