Francesco Paolo Michetti RETURN oil on canvas,... Lot 47

Francesco Paolo Michetti RETURN oil on canvas, cm 36x30 signature executed in 1887 Provenance Private collection, Florence Exhibitions National Exhibition, Venice 1887, reproduced here on p. 27, no. 103 Bibliography Arnaldo Ferraguti, Francesco Paolo Michetti, 1911, p. 496 Franco Di Tizio, Francesco Paolo Michetti: nella vita e nell'arte, Pescara 2007, p.170 Francesco Paolo Michetti. General Catalogue, Milan 2018, vol. I, no. 367, p. 218 The work "Return" that we have the pleasure of presenting today is made by Francesco Paolo Michetti shortly before the 1887 National Art Exhibition in Venice, where the painting was exhibited together with twelve other works by the artist. Traces of the work were later lost, so much so that the location was unknown in the artist's general catalogue at the time of its publication. A heartfelt and rightful thanks goes to the Scientific Committee of the General Catalogue of Francesco Paolo Michetti who helped us to confirm this important discovery for the collectors' panorama. Today the painting returns to reveal itself, bringing with it that popular epos, to which Michetti is so ancestrally linked. The artist's panic-stricken feeling for nature finds in the two little shepherds returning from the pasture an intimate and very sweet dimension, which is complemented by the small size of this small oil painting. Under a sky stained with clouds, which is about to set, the two young people walk through the grass, followed by their flock: he holds the freshly picked fruit to his breast, while she turns her childishly melancholy gaze away. In this painting we find many of the motifs that characterize a moment of fervid artistic production: at this chronological height Michetti had in fact achieved enormous success not only in Italy, but also abroad, such as in London and Paris, where his beginnings date back to the early 1870s. In spite of his international fame, Abruzzo, the artist's native land, will always remain the inspirational muse of his work. And it is precisely the bond with his Abruzzese roots that unites him with his friend and poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who said of him "he now loves to capture the most singular aspects of nature [...] a fantastic effect, almost dreamlike; but the scene is real". His fascination with reality is translated in Il Ritorno into a pastoral idyll that captures the immediacy of a piece of popular life, which has the flavour of the ancient and the eternal.