Giacomo Favretto was a native of Venice who became one of the most admired and sought-after artists of Northern Italy during his brief career. Born in 1849, he died in 1887 at the age of only 38, but during his time as a working artist he carved out a niche as a painter of modern Venetian genre scenes. He moved away from the traditional history themes that would have been the focus of study during his years at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (the Ventian Academy of Fine arts) to establish himself as a modern painter with a vigorous style rooted in his local tradition. Although today the concept of ‘genre painting’ feels dated, in the 1870s small works of every day life and surroundings, rather than the ambitious historic narratives that were the standard exhibition fare of the previous hundred years, was quite modern. 

Favretto was born into a poor family, the son of a carpenter, and it is said that he was able to go to art school due to an unknown wealthy patron who discovered him making beautiful silhouette cuttings in his family workshop. Due to his distinctive work, he found success and wealth (at least compared to his poor beginnings) fairly quickly. He found a market for his paintings of Venetian life in the wealthy art buyers of Northern Italy, even including Queen Margherita of Italy as one of his patrons. Both his subject matter – quiet moments of daily life, sometimes humorous, sometimes touching, but always sensitive and with an eye to capture the beauty in the scene – and his paint handling, bold and painterly with a distinctive palette of blacks and browns highlighted with touches of orange, green, and blue – made him stand out as a leader of the new genre. 

He travelled to Paris in 1873 to take part in the Universal Exposition there, and held exhibitions in several other cities of Italy to great acclaim. But nearly the whole of his life was spent in his beloved Venice that he captured so beautifully, and his work remains very much in the Venetian tradition of painting, as these works of his show.

Researched from The History of Modern Italian Art by Aston Rollins Willard (1902) – a well-written and entertaining read for anyone interested in turn-of-the-century Italian painters.