(Trieste 1856–1922 Venice)
Venice, A View of a Winter Canal, signed P. Fragiacomo, oil on canvas, 23.5 x 50 cm, framed

Provenance:
The family of the artist, Venice; “
Il Magnifico” gallery, Florence-Milan;
Private Collection Italy.

Exhibited:
Venice, XIV Esposizione Internationale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 1924,
room 34.

Catalogued and illustrated in:
Ferdinando Donzeli, l’Ottocento Italiano nel piccolo formato, Florence, 2001,
p. 191, no. 140;
Andrea Baboni, la poetica della neve, Piacenza, 2011, pp. 15, 18, no. 7;
Andrea Baboni, Pietro Fragiacomo, Fondazione CRTrieste, 2016, p. 344, no. 202.

The work presented here, which depicts ‘A Venetian Canal in Winter’, underscores the artist’s interest in depicting the canals cloaked in the darkness and melancholy of a snowy Venice, where the soft lighting creates an atmosphere of veiled sadness. This lot is a study for the larger composition ‘L’inverno’ held by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. The layout of the work has a fascinatingly poetic intensity, with the solitary boat in the foreground sitting still. The painting was created en plein air. Fragiacomo attended the first Triennial Exhibition of Fine Arts of Brera in 1891, as shown by the label on the reverse of the canvas, enabling him to be considered one of the greatest Italian landscape painters of the 19th century.