Tozzi responded to the Parisian avantgarde by taking the models for his painting from the Tuscan Renaissance, as attested by the antique dress in the “sad” portrait of his wife, the Raphaelite pose and the reduction of psychological investigation to timeless melancholy. 

The family of Mario Tozzi, the first of five children, settled shortly after his birth in the small town of Suna on the Piedmontese shore of Lake Maggiore. He studied art at the academy in Bologna from 1913 to 1916, together with Giorgio Morandi and Osvaldo Licini, and was then exposed to the horrors of war at the front. In 1919, after demobilisation, he married Marie-Thérèse Lemaire, a young Frenchwoman with a degree in Italian whom he had met in Suna in 1907, and they left to live with her family in Paris in an apartment looking onto Saint Germain-des-Prés. Tozzi showed work in the Salon but also maintained contact with Italy, taking part in the national and European exhibitions of the Italian Novecento group and writing for the magazine Le Arti Plastiche as from 1927. In 1928 he and René Paresce founded a group of Italian painters resident in the French capital, who held a number of exhibitions until 1932 under the name Les Italiens de Paris. Varying in composition, it included Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Filippo de Pisis, Massimo Campigli and Gino Severini, and enjoyed the support of critics like Waldemar George. After returning to Rome in 1935, Tozzi was very involved with shows and institutional activities, interrupted only in the 1950s by a long period of illness. Much of Tozzi’s early work in Paris focuses on subjects of simple domestic life with forays into portraiture, landscape and still life. His studios on Rue Balanty in Paris and in the Lemaires’ house in the country at Lignorelles in Burgundy were animated by the close, homely company of his wife, her sister Ninette and, as from 1923, their daughter Francesca. 

Numerous portraits capturing the sweet features of Marie-Thérèse formed the basis in this period for a model of femininity that was to remain a constant in Tozzi’s work. One of these, datable to 1920 (fig. 1), displays similarities in size, pose and viewpoint with the Cerruti portrait, which is instead dated 1924. The return to the same subject and the slow development of formal elements, leading in this case to elimination of the landscape in the background, are in line with a now anti-Impressionistic approach to painting: “I now take a very long time to paint and devote hundreds of sittings to certain works […]. I have now, however, got into the good habit of doing a lot of drawings before starting on the canvas and realise that I hesitate less […]. And so I study, finish and pursue the form but do not copy superficially what I see.”¹ Tozzi responded to the Parisian avantgarde by taking the models for his painting from the Tuscan Renaissance, as attested by the antique dress in the “sad” portrait of his wife, the Raphaelite pose and the reduction of psychological investigation to timeless melancholy. Tozzi’s classicism was not in any case isolated or outmoded, as attested by his attention to the recent works of André Derain and above all his interest in Paul Cézanne, a key point of reference for the European “return to order”. It was this sculptural and monumental approach that led to Tozzi’s reappearance on the Italian national scene in 1924, the way for which was prepared by contacts like Gian Emilio Malerba and Campigli, his future companions in the Novecento group. 

The portrait remained in the artist’s family and ended up in the possession of Arnaldo, the youngest brother, who donated a number of works by Tozzi, mostly from the early 1920s, to the Museo del Paesaggio in Verbania in 1996. It was probably in the same period that Marie-Thérèse triste came onto the art market in Verbania (Studio d’Arte Lanza) and Milan (Galleria Pace) before being purchased for the Cerruti Collection. 

Filippo Bosco

1 Letter from M. Tozzi to A. Massara, 19 June 1921, in Pasquali 1988, vol. I, pp. 78-79.