ROME.- Ottocento Art Gallery is offering important masterpieces coming from several private collections gathered in the usual monthly exhibition aimed to the sale. The selection starts from an oil on canvas, made by Giuseppe Canella, Entrance of the Royal Gardens in Venice. In this painting, Castelli painted the view of Venice taken from the entrance to the Royal Gardens portraying Punta della Dogana and the Chiesa della Salute in the center of the painting while in the background on the left is visible the Basilica del Redentore on the Giudecca island.

The selection of the proposal displayed by Ottocento Art Gallery continues with a wonderful watercolour sketch life by Mosè Bianchi. Born in Monza, he belonged to a family moved to Milan who let him enroll at the Brera Academy. Having interrupted his studies to serve in the second war of independence, he returned to attend the school of painting directed by Giuseppe Bertini. The award of a grant in 1867 enabled him to visit Venice and then Paris in 1869. He took part with some success at the Brera exhibitions and the Vienna Exhibition of 1873. It was in this period that he began to paint genre scenes in 18th-century settings and numerous portraits, soon becoming one of the artists most in demand with the Milanese middle classes. He returned to Venice in 1879 and visited Chioggia for the first time. Both places were to be featured also in later years in a series of intense views exhibited at exhibitions in Milan and Venice alongside genre scenes, views of Milan and landscapes of the countryside around Gignese.

Others important paintings complete the exhibition, such as a beautiful couple of paintings by Enrico Coleman who was an Italian painter of British nationality. He was the son of the English painter Charles Coleman and brother of the less well-known Italian painter Francesco Coleman. He painted, in oils and in watercolours, the landscapes of the Campagna Romana and the Agro Pontino; he was a collector, grower and painter of orchids. The paintings offered by Ottocento Art Gallery portrait. The animal kingdom characterizes his best landscape scenes, the undisputed protagonist of his poetry, as in these watercolors presented here, a technique adopted mainly by the artist during his career, where a pock-saddle riding a horse in the middle of the composition pulls a white foal. The action takes place on a day bathed in the light of the first noon in a pristine corner of the Roman countryside, the theater of artistic research conducted by Enrico Coleman who identified his aesthetic style in the genre of the rural scene, placing himself at the head of the naturalistic current Roman painting of the second half of the 19th century. His loyalty to the theme of nature, pursued throughout his life, was so tenacious and constant that he induced the artists who, in 1904, gave life to the group of the “XXV of the Roman Campaign”, to give him the presidency of the association.

The selection of 20th century artworks closes the exhibition, with artworks by Afro Basaldella, Giorgio Morandi, Mario Schifano, Giulio Turcato. In particular, the artwork by Afro stands out for the precious mattes used by the artist into creating a jewel in yellow and white gold finished with diamonds and emeralds. Afro was an Italian painter and educator in the post-World War II period. He began as a member of the Scuola Romana, and worked together with Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana. In 1950 he had a solo exhibition at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York, and in 1952 he joined the Gruppo degli Otto, with whom he exhibited in 1956 at the Venice Biennale and went on to win the prize for best Italian painter: just in these years we can assign the Anthropomorphic Broche offered by Ottocento Art Gallery.