Orientalist Oil Painting of a Market Scene by Gustavo Simoni

#18163: Orientalist Oil Painting of a Market Scene by Gustavo Simoni
Italian, 1903
Canvas: height 40cm, width 66cm, depth 2cm
Frame: height 55cm, width 81cm, depth 6cm

This sunlit street scene is painted in oil on canvas and shows a row of shops shaded by matting stretched over a framework of poles, with figures, a donkey and scattered produce set along a street of pale sand. Simoni worked up subjects of this kind in his studio in Rome from studies made during extended stays in North Africa, and this canvas was completed there in 1903.
At the right, a bearded man in a white robe and cream turban sits with his hands folded before a stall of stacked crates and sacks, a dark donkey standing beside him under a red and green patterned saddle blanket. Glass lanterns hang from the framework above, and baskets, a cooking pot and a tall pole fill the deep shade behind.
At the left, two women sit on a low bench against a shuttered door, one in turquoise with a pink face veil, the other in blue with an ochre shawl, an earthenware jug at their feet and bundles of long green canes propped beside them. Further back, a figure in a pink headcloth is seated in a doorway, with a second figure in white beyond. Oranges and two shallow earthenware dishes lie across the sand in the foreground, and a strip of blue sky and green foliage opens above the rooftops at the upper left.
The painting belongs to the later part of Simoni's career. The figures and the donkey are drawn with precision, while the awnings, shopfronts and background interiors are built up in loaded, visible strokes, the paint standing proud of the canvas where the light strikes the matting and the ground. Detail is suggested rather than itemised, in a manner close to Impressionist practice, and the composition is held together by the fall of light across the street rather than by outline.
The painting is signed, inscribed and dated in dark paint at the lower right, 'Gustavo Simoni / Roma 1903', and is presented in a moulded giltwood frame with foliate and palmette ornament running through both the outer and inner mouldings.
Gustavo Simoni was born in Rome in 1845 and died at Palestrina in 1926, working as a painter, watercolourist and teacher. From 1877 he travelled in France and Spain and, above all, in North Africa, making extended stays in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco and living for several years in an isolated house near Tlemcen. In 1889 he was awarded a gold medal in Paris for a large-scale depiction of the burning of Persepolis. King Umberto I was among his regular clients, and he was a member of the Accademia di San Luca. In the 1890s he opened a studio in Paris and founded a school of Orientalist painting in Rome.
$52,500