Studio: international art (37.1906)

Angelo Dair Oca Bianca

were at times quite crude in certain pictures, he
would occasionally sacrifice feeling and technical
subtlety. But these qualities came in due
course. As time went on the young painter
schooled himself into a method wherein his
colours became toned and softened, and the
sun painter—/homme du soleil—as he was called,
developed into the painter of the imagination,
the painter of harmonies indefinite and placid.
It was evident that DalP Oca had refined
himself, and the external aspects of painting
—that is to say, light and colour—no longer
sufficed to an artist under the sway of the
feelings and aspirations exhaled by men and
things. Thus he devoted himself to painting
the soul and not merely the body, or rather he
applied himself to depict the body animated
by passion and sorrow, pain and joy, to show
the intimate and poetic beauty which goes
beyond the purely plastic rules of line and tone

agnei.lo" by a. dam.' oca bianca

and colour. That is where the person-
ality of DalP Oca began to interest the
intelligent critic, who at the outset of
the painter's career—all the noisy reclame
of the papers notwithstanding—could
find no adequate reason to rejoice in
him. At first he had failed to cultivate
in his palette that delicacy which later
came to him with deeper knowledge of
life.

DalP Oca is of quite humble origin.
While still a child he was employed in a
stone-mason's yard, and then entered
the Academie, with a mind full of long-
ing and of hope. But he did not derive
from the school such advantage as to
produce the painter we so often admire.
What he did acquire, however, was an
insatiable determination to learn, to
fortify his mind by the reading of the
portrait of the artist's mother by a. dall' oca bianca best authors. Thus DalP Oca is not

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