Ugo Gheduzzi, Paesaggio italiano, anni '10, Olio su cartone

1910s Italian Signed Landscape
Beautiful and important oil painting on cardboard by the great Bolognese artist Ugo Gheduzzi (Crespellano BO 5 March 1853 - Turin 1925).
The light of rare intensity and the clear colours make this work a small masterpiece.
Signed on the reverse “U. Gheduzzi”
This artwork, never before on the market, comes from an important private collection and is beautified by an impressive antique frame in gilded wood.

Ugo Gheduzzi (Crespellano, Bologna March 5, 1853 - Turin in 1925).
Emilian painter, born in Crespellano, near Bologna, deals with the picture of gender, but more the country. In Turin, in 1880, he had a painting entitled: On the street of Monteveglio; in Rome, in 1883, a beautiful painting representing some of the Surroundings of Belluno and in Turin, in 1884, a good painting for color and drawing, entitled: On the end of summer". (Angelo De Gubernatis in 'Dictionary of living Italian artists', and Gonnelli, 1906)

He was born in Crespellano, in the province of Bologna, on March 5, 1853 and entered the Academy of Fine Arts in 1867; he obtained school prizes in elements of Ornato (1868), Decoration (1870), elements of Figure (1870 and 1871) and finally in Landscape and elements of Architecture (1872). In 1874, still very young and just finished his studies, he was called to Turin, to work for the Teatro Regio, by Riccardo Fontana, already a collaborator of Augusto Ferri. It's the beginning of a career as a set designer that will last a lifetime. The set designer's work, however, included, at the end of the theatrical season, moments of break that were generally spent in the hometown, to be with the family. During these periods Ugo Gheduzzi practiced landscape painting. This habit can also be found, for example, in Alfonso Goldini and was quite common. Thus, even of Gheduzzi you can follow this double existence of set designer in Turin, where he lives in the attics of the Regio, constantly at work, and in Pragatto, a small town in Crespellano, as a village painter. As a set designer, the most substantial nucleus of his sketches is preserved by the Gheduzzi heirs, given that the sets, already by their nature ephemeral works, are lost following a serious fire that devastated the Regio in 1936. Many of these sketches and drawings are reproduced in the works of Basso and Viale Ferrero (see the bibliography) and include shows such as Verdi's Aida, performed at the Regio in 1879, the Excelsior grand ball (1881-1882) - given in Turin in honor of the opening of the Fréjus tunnel -, Wagner's Lohengrin (1890), Giacomo Puccini's absolute first Manon Lescaut at the Regio in 1893, Tosca (1900) again by Puccini, Sigfrido (1905-1906), still Wagner's.

However, it is as a landscape painter that Belluzzi remembers him, preserving a photograph of the Bolognese countryside (n. 132) presented at the San Michele in Bosco Exhibition in 1888; in Palermo in the same year he was awarded the gold medal for Paragon Stone. Throughout the eighties of the nineteenth century, Gheduzzi presented himself at national exhibitions: in Rome in 1883 (Dintorni di Belluno), in Turin in 1884 (Sul finire d'e summere) and in 1902 (Casas rusticche); he also participated in the exhibitions of the promoters (1907: Piedmontese countryside, purchased by the Dukes of Genoa) and the Circle of Artists of the Piedmontese city (1917: In the shadow of the beeches, At work). In Bologna he frequently presents large copies of works at the exhibitions of Francesco Francia; he is flanked, in his work at the Regio as in landscape painting, by the firstborn Augustus: to the Emilian hills are added the Piedmontese Alps. The Gheduzzi family in fact moved slowly to Piedmont since Augusto first trained in the Academy in Bologna but then moved to Turin and that he, like the other brothers, Giuseppe - also in Turin in the Academy - and then Cesare and Mario, will work as set designers at the Regio for his father, becoming both Cesare and, above all, Mario, pioneers of the new cinematographic art. In 1889 Ugo Gheduzzi was appointed honorary academician in Bologna and in 1912 ordinary member. Two of his paintings, two oils, one on cardboard (Landsage with town), the other on board (House of Ceres), which in the materials denounce their origin of painting almost leisure, carried out in moments of break, are at the MAMbo in Bologna, but many of his works are at the Albertina of Turin, in private houses or on the market. In the area of Crespellano he then works as a painter decorator and of him are to remember at least the two large canvases of 1893 representing La Fiera di Pragatto and Scena di caccia in Palude, intended to cover or replace the identical mural paintings made by the painter in Giulio Stagni's villa, and the room-country in the Bentivoglio-Grassi palace now Garagnani of 1894. In Turin in 1923 he took care of the scenery for the staging of the Passion of Christ at the Stadium of Turin, a grandiose sacred representation that provides for the reconstruction of the places and facts of the Passion of Jesus Christ through tableaux vivants. Ugo Gheduzzi died in Turin in 1925.

Isabella Stancari

Dimensions whiteout frame cm 40 x 20