Edoardo Gelli

Edoardo Gelli, “Portrait of a Buttero”, Date Unknown, 44.6 x 32.4 cm, Private Collection

The painter and engraver Edoardo Gelli was born in Savone, Italy, in September of 1852, to parents of Lucca origin. He began his artistic studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where he attended the courses of  sculptor Carlo Dal Poggetto.  Gelli also followed for six months the lessons of painter and etcher Antonio Fontaneis held at the Academy of Lucca in 1868. 

In the same year, Edoardo Gelli had his first exhibition at the Promotrice of Florence where he entered a landscape painting. He moved to Florence to complete his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, with painter Antonio Ciseri, known for his religious subjects. Although Gelli’s body of work is oriented to the re-enactment of  seventeenth and eighteenth-century settings, he also produced many portraits and scenes of historical genre. 

Edoardo Gelli established a career as a portraitist with many illustrious and famous figures in the upper bourgeoisie sitting for his works. In 1886, he received a royal commission to work for the Austro-Hungarian Imperial court, where he painted a portrait of Franz Joseph I, the Emperor of Austria. It was during his three years of service to the Emperor that Gelli painted the 1887 portrait of his former teacher, Carlo Dal Poggetto, which is currently preserved at the National Museum of Palazzo Mansi in the city center of Lucca.

Chiefly known for his genre and costume portraits, Gelli’s work may be compared with those of Italian genre painter Francesco Vinea and Tito Conti, the Florence-based painter of genre costume or historical subjects. A talented artist with a vibrant palette and fine brushwork, he received a series of awards and became an Honorary Academician of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. 

Gelli entered his “The Lost Chord” in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, informally known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, in Missouri, United States.  He retired from public exhibitions in  the 1910s, preferring to paint in private. Edoardo Gelli died in Florence in 1933. Several of his works can be seen at the Pinacoteca di Lucca, Italy.

Insert Image: Edoardo Gelli, “Young Odalisque Smoking Narghilè”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 158 x 117 cm, Private Collection

Note:   A buttero is a herder from the Maremma, the coastal region of Tuscany, Italy, or the Pontine Marshes to the south, who tendered livestock, predominantly cattle, from the back of his working-breed horse. The attire of the butteri has its roots in the fourteenth and fifteenth-centuries, when many pastoral workers found better pay as mercenaries. Returning to an agricultural lifestyle, they brought with them items of military dress.