“His figures are never composed in attitudes of cold rigidity. On the contrary, in his overwhelming need to capture the very vibration of movement, the impetuous ardour of the pursuit sometimes forces his hand […], distorting the correctness of line to some extent.”

“Deeply and faithfully in love with the streets and quays of Venice, the canals with their countless reflections, their riot of light and colour […]. In an age like ours, when the old boundaries marked out for every art blur and waver to the point of insubstantiality, he has remained a painter in the most traditional sense of the word, not through blind love of the old or hatred and disdain of the new but simply through the overriding need of his innermost self.”¹ It was thus that Margherita Sarfatti described the painter Ettore Tito in the magazine Emporium in 1905 and immediately defined the subject matter - both thematic and geographic - of his art, bound up indivisibly with Venice. 

Born in Castellammare di Stabia, Tito moved to the city at a very early age with his family and graduated when still very young at the local Accademia di Belle Arti, where he was to take over the chair of his master Pompeo Marino Molmenti in 1895. Venice immediately became the paramount subject of his painting and views of its streets and squares animated by local inhabitants won success with critics and the general public alike. He also produced work of a more allegorical and literary nature that gained particular approval both inside and outside Italy, as attested by regular participation in exhibitions in Britain and the Austrian and German area. 

In addition to the naturalism of his Venetian subjects and his symbolic works, Tito enjoyed his first great success in portraiture with L’amazzone (The Horsewoman), a full-length painting of his wife Lucia Velluti in riding habit presented in a solo show held within the framework of the Milan Expo of 1906. Influenced by various artists encountered in connection with the Venice Biennale, especially foreigners like John Lavery, John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, but also Giovanni Boldini, Tito came to focus increasingly on portraits, not least due to the countless requests received from the wealthy Italian and foreign bourgeoisie resident in Venice. Down the years, Fortuny, Luigi Nono and the architect Raimondo d’Aronco were regular visitors to his studio. Ritratto di donna presents a female figure in profile of a type recurrent in Tito’s work,² with reddish hair and an aquiline nose wearing the traditional Venetian zendado or shawl. One of a series of figurative works produced in Venice around 1905, it displays similarities with canvases like Riflessi azzurri (Light Blue Reflections, 1906) and Chioggiotta (Woman from Chioggia, 1907), both owned by the Frugone family of Genoese industrialists.³ The subject of the Venetian woman of the middle or lower classes, shown here against the background of a melancholy seascape, was in any case one that also enjoyed success at the time in the literary sphere, not least through the seductive prose of the American author Henry James, a frequent visitor to Venice as from 1869. 

As Sarfatti observes, Tito’s painting of figures was esteemed above all for its vivid rendering of the subject, sometimes also allowing formal distortion in order to capture them impressionistically: “His figures are never composed in attitudes of cold rigidity. On the contrary, in his overwhelming need to capture the very vibration of movement, the impetuous ardour of the pursuit sometimes forces his hand […], distorting the correctness of line to some extent.”⁴ 

Alessandro Botta 

¹ Sarfatti 1905, p. 251.

² The female subject appears to be the same as the one portrayed in Vento (The Wind), described as follows by Margherita Sarfatti in 1905: “A magnificent head of a woman full of character with reddish hair, large eyes and a slightly aquiline nose: a couple of feet of canvas and apparently four brushstrokes of background and yet the same impetuous breeze that twists the halo of a white handkerchief around the head also drives the clouds above her in the sky and the waves in the water behind her, making them sparkle and bending them into powerful curves with the violent impetus of flight” (Sarfatti 1905, p. 262).

³ For the the Frugone family as collectors of Ettore Tito’s works, see M. F. Giubilei, “Passioni da collezionisti e mercanti: i Tito delle Raccolte Frugone di Genova”, in Venice 1998, pp. 57-64.

⁴ Sarfatti 1905, p. 259.