Studio: international art (18.1900)

Pietro Fragiacomo

"CALIMA CREPUSCOLARE " FROM A PAINTING BY PIETRO FRAGIACOMO

winds a torrent like a silver ribbon, lighted by the Fragiacomo is a poet in conception and an artist

rays of the setting sun. To the right and left are in execution. His works, pitched in a minor key,

rocks, woods, and green hills. are delicate, forceful, and eminently true.

Two other pictures, recently completed and at Isabella M. Anderton.

present to be seen at the Venice Exhibition, are

Aprile and the Piazza di S. Marco. --

The first shows peach-trees in full flower, and

a peasant woman leaning over a limpid stream in Our Melbourne correspondent writes :—" The

the act of drinking. Melbourne public, to whom such excellence is

In the second the church of S. Marco, lighted little known, has been astonished and delighted by

up by the golden reflections of the sun that has just the most admirable exhibition of etchings that has

set, rises like a vision before the spectator. yet reached Australia. Messrs. Robertson and

Pietro Fragiacomo commenced his artistic career Moffat recently fitted up the 1 Old Court Studios '

comparatively late. From the workshop of an with one.hundred and seventy rare and bewitching

engineering firm at Treviso with which he was proofs—some of them unique—from the hands of

placed as a lad, he passed into the designing- Seymour Haden, Whistler, Waltner, Helleu, Haig,

room; and thence at the age of twenty, giving the Strang, Macbeth, Fortuny, Lionel Smythe, C. J.

rein to his natural inclination, to the Accademia at Watson, Duveneck, Wilfrid Ball, Mortimer Menpes,

Venice. But academic art seems to have pleased and other celebrities of the needle. The exhibition

him little more than the designs for machines, was opened by His Excellency the Governor (Lord

He abandoned lecture and class-room to go Brassey), who made several purchases, and the

straight to Nature ; spent his time wandering over National Galleries of Sydney and Melbourne spent

the lagoons studying sunshine and cloud, rippling over &oo in purchases of a dozen examples,

iridescence and furious wave, together with the Among professional artists there is only one etcher

technical means of fixing them, steeping himself in in Melbourne—Mr. Mather, the President of the

the chastened melancholy which the departed glory Victorian Academy of Arts; but he has many

of Venice breathes over the modern city. In 1880 pupils, and these, with amateurs and a large

he appeared before the public at the Turin Exhi- picture-public, have thronged the galleries daily;

bition. Since then he has exhibited much both in so that this pioneer undertaking will bear good

Italy and abroad, and has received many medals. fruit in taste, knowledge, and emulation."