[...] Reycend is not only a painter of tiny panels but, indeed, displays “sure control also over huge paintings”.

Undated but presumably painted in 1886, the Cerruti Collection view of the port of Genoa exemplifies the “Impressionist” evolution in the work of Enrico Reycend, which became increasingly less descriptive in the 1880s through experimentation with a fresh and poetic painting of quick brushstrokes seeking to capture the appearance of ever-changing nature in different kinds of light. After the artist’s first trip to Paris in 1878, which enabled him to see the works of Corot first-hand, it was above all during repeated stays in Genoa and western Liguria that his repertoire of themes from contemporary life was enriched with new subject matter drawing inspiration from a “quiet and almost submissive everyday dimension”.¹ Views of the shore with figures and boats (he depicted the beach at Vado with the smoking chimneys of the ironworks in the background as early as 1882), vast expanses of sea and ports like that of Genoa, depicted from different viewpoints, feature in a large number of paintings, sketches in oil and drawings. 

Reycend presented works on this subject at various exhibitions during the decade in cities like Turin (at the Promotrice and the Circolo degli Artisti as from 1885), Genoa (as early as 1884), Florence, Venice, Bologna and Paris. In a well-known article of 1952 in Paragone, the art historian Roberto Longhi observed that this subject was one of the most important for the definition of the artist’s personal and highly original style of painting, as exemplified by two views of the harbour painted in the period 1885-86. One “with the water dazzled by the sun between the dark colours of the ships”, was a work he had seen years before in Reycend’s studio and sought in vain to track down. The other, again lost and of which he had only a “faded photograph”, struck him nonetheless as “without precedent - and, alas, without sequel - in 19th-century Italian art, worked as it is from end to end with dense and levitating texture, a teeming mass of strokes and cedillas, peelings and strips of colour, all in accordance with poetic distances of air and light. A term of comparison, similar but not so strong, is provided in 1884 only by Boudin’s view of the port of Trouville, whose ‘meteorological beauties’ were praised by Baudelaire.”² 

Exactly like the painting referred to by Longhi, now in a private collection (fig. 1), the large canvas examined here - Reycend is not only a painter of tiny panels but, indeed, displays “sure control also over huge paintings”³ - provides an excellent example of his mastery of a free and sketch-like technique made up of vibrant and intensely luminous layers of paint, based in this case on shades of brown and blue, black and reddish strokes with just the odd touch of colour for the flags on the masts and the clothes of the few figures on a quay bathed in tranquil sunlight. Regarded as one of Reycend’s masterpieces, this airy view is focused, unlike the other, on the expanse of water in the dock with the Lanterna lighthouse in the background on the right, sailing ships moored to the wharves, steamships filling the air with puffs of smoke, and the quay in the foreground with warehouses for goods and five carts in a line. 

A label on the back of the canvas indicates that the painting, originally in an arched frame (fig. 2), was shown at the 1886 exhibition of the Società Promotrice in Turin (room V, no. 435). Piergiorgio Dragone maintains, however, that the canvas exhibited (for possession of which the members drew lots, with the lawyer Ettore Vescovo emerging as the winner) was another one. The version that attracted Longhi’s attention does, indeed, still bear a tag from the exhibition with the number 435,⁴ whereas the Cerruti canvas is, instead, numbered 592 on the back. While the archival documentation sheds no light on the history of Il porto di Genova (The Port of Genoa) apart from former ownership by a private collector (the extraordinary discretion with which Francesco Federico Cerruti built up his collection is in any case well known), the work did pass through at least one other important collection. It was, in fact, once owned by Gustavo Adolfo Rol, who lent it in 1962 for the 120th regional exhibition of the Società Promotrice in Turin (room I, no. 7). 

Monica Tomiato 

¹ G. L. Marini, “Il personale impressionismo di Enrico Reycend,” in Turin 2018, p. 19.

² Longhi 1952, ed. 1973, p. 1043.

³ R. Maggio Serra, “La pittura in Piemonte nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento,” in Castelnuovo 1991, p. 75.

⁴ Dragone P. 2000, p. 258.