ROME.- Among latest acquisitions, Ottocento Art Gallery offers a masterpiece by Italian painter Camillo Innocenti (1871–1961) which embodies a beautiful proof of his pictorial talent.

L. Seitz’s pupil, Camillo Innocenti begins to paint influenced by D. Morelli and A. Mancini, achieving remarkable success with folkloristic works. The divisionist experience (1903 – 04) and subsequently the interest for the Nabis led him to a clearer painting, who developed in his typical, bright interior images with female figures.

In 1912 he was among the founders of the Roman Secession, born in controversy with the Society of Amateurs and Cultures of Fine Arts, considered to be overdue and overly tied to official environments. The first exhibition of the group took place at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 1913 but Innocenti, while being among the protagonists, presented only a portrait: most of his recent works, in fact, were exhibited in Paris at the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune gallery, at a solo – exhibition which definitively consecrated his international success.

Precisely in this important Parisian solo exhibition held in 1913 the painting presented here was on display, with the title “L’homme aux chiens” (n.37 in the catalog with a preface by Gabriel Mourey), a work presented by the artist also at the international exhibition in Buenos Aires, held the year before, in 1912, as shown by the label on the back of the canvas, and, presumably, at the LXXVI exhibition of the Amatori and Cultori of 1906, with the title “Bracchiere”.

Protagonist of the painting is the imposing figure of an aristocrat, the plumed hat with wide flaps, the rifle on his shoulder, the elegant uniform of a horseman, followed by a group of dogs, probably during a hunt. The scene has located by the painter in Villa Borghese, probably in the area today identifiable with the Piazzale Scipione Borghese, where there is a large circular tank built in the nineteenth century with the statue of Venus placed on a cliff, very similar to the visible one on the right in the central register of the painting.

The painting is to be considered a masterpiece within the most fruitful artistic season of Camillo Innocenti, symbolist and naturalist at the same time, in which the search for form, the sense of color, even the stain, animate his pictorial ductus, expression of a technique animated by a soft “pastel paradivisionism”, according to the definition of Rosci, prelude to a divisionism wide-open in blocks, chromatically very bright.