Woman Muse Artist.
Portraits by Cesare Tallone between the 19th and 20th centuries

Director of the Carrara Academy in Bergamo and professor of painting at the Brera Academy, Cesare Tallone (1853-1919), a highly successful artist, portraitist of Queen Margherita and founder of one of the first women’s painting schools, is the protagonist of the new exhibition at Villa Bassi Rathgeb. The exhibition — entirely produced, organized, and promoted by the Municipality of Abano Terme, through the Villa Bassi Rathgeb Museum — stems from a work of study and in-depth analysis of the Museum’s permanent collection and in particular on the core of works by Cesare Tallone, giving special emphasis to the artist’s female portraits, which unfold the story of women’s role in Italian society between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the exhibition path, dialoguing with Tallone, are included, among others, the Portrait of Emma Gramatica (1911) by Lino Selvatico from the Ricci Oddi Gallery in Piacenza and the Portrait of a Lady with Flowers by Giovanni Boldini, which reveal to the audience the female worldview of the Belle Époque.

The exhibition presents some of the portraits of the Tallone family, including that of the artist’s wife, the poet Eleonora Tango, and the children Guido and Irene, depicted from life in the guise of shepherds, ciociare, housewives, and sometimes in images with an intimate and dreamy flavor. Among the artist’s paintings present in the permanent collection of Villa Bassi Rathgeb is the Portrait of his sister Linda Maria, painted in 1887 on the occasion of her engagement to the engineer Guglielmo Davoglio, who was also portrayed on that occasion: the different exhibition and collection histories of the two paintings, conceived as a pendant, have kept them separated for a long time. The portrait of Linda Maria arrived in Abano Terme with the Bassi Rathgeb Collection in 1980, while that of Guglielmo Davoglio, sent in 1887 to the National Exhibition in Venice, entered a private collection and is now part of the Civic Museums of Pavia. This recent rediscovery has allowed, on the occasion of the exhibition, to finally reunite the two works, among the most intense portraits executed by Tallone between 1885 and 1899.

In this free and open context, some of the artist’s female portraits come to life, returning a kaleidoscope of emblematic images of a society in transformation, from the Double Female Portrait (circa 1887) to that of the actress Lina Cavalieri (circa 1905), a style icon who also stands out in the Campari poster present in the exhibition along with others from the Salce Collection in Treviso, up to the “scandalous” Female Nude (circa 1913).

Cover: Cesare Tallone, Ritratto di Lina Cavalieri, 1905 circa, Sesto San Giovanni (Milano), Archivio Galleria Campari