Attilio Stefanori

The sun has barely risen (its orange reflection can be seen in the chapel windows of the estate building) but the country road is already busy with village women going about their day's work. Beside the road is the timeless figure of a man toiling in a hayfield in the cool air of early morning.

Born in Rome in 1860, Attilio Stefanori was singled out in a 1909 Italian survey of contemporary art as a painter of "rare vigour in the handling of colour and light, whose oil and watercolour landscapes have won him many accolades". A number of his landscape studies were shown at an exhibition of bozzetti held in Rome in May 1900, prompting one reviewer to praise his "delicate small-scale pictures full of beautiful visions of the Roman campagna, the supreme poetry of which he is capable of capturing like few others".

Stefanori also painted in the Italian regions of Abruzzo and Umbria. He exhibited in Venice, Milan and Turin in addition to his native city, and his repertoire included Biblical and historical subjects.  

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

• Agostino Mario Comanducci, Pittori italiani dell'ottocento: dizionario critico e documentario. Milan, Casa Editrice Artisti d'Italia, 1934.

• Luigi Càllari, Storia dell'arte contemporanea italiana: (con indice degli artisti menzionati). Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1909.

• Rivista d'Italia, Year III, Vols I, II. Rome: Società editrice Dante Alighieri, 1900.

• Ashton Rollins Willard, History of Modern Italian Art, 2nd ed. London, New York, Bombay: Longmans, Green and Co, 1900.