As the art critic Angelo Dragone observes, everything in the places he loved appears to be “transformed into a visual stimulus capable of interesting him”.

In 1886, on his return from a trip to Rome and a short stay in Alba to see his friend Giovanni Camerana (the dedicatee of Alba, now in the Cerruti Collection, cat. p. 602), Lorenzo Delleani went to spend the summer at his hometown Pollone in the province of Biella. There he painted en plein air near the town and along the paths leading to the alpine pastures, all the way to the lakes of Mucrone and La Vecchia as well as the Sanctuary of Oropa. This was a period of intense work and great creative felicity for the artist, who produced about sixty small panels between early August and early September, frequently painting more than one work a day. As the art critic Angelo Dragone observes, everything in the places he loved appears to be “transformed into a visual stimulus capable of interesting him”¹: clothes hung out to dry, a lane between old houses, children playing, a group of women leaving the church and the stark beauty of the mountain landscapes with green pastures and the constant movement of clouds in the sky. 

Many of these panels (the first he used in the 45 x 31cm format) depict local men and women engaged in their everyday occupations or events of communal life such as festivities and processions, a recurrent subject also in the larger canvases presented by Delleani as from the 1880s in the Turin Promotrice exhibitions and others inside and outside Italy. In particular, the function and celebrations of the oratory of San Barnaba in Pollone were captured in a series of small panels painted from life and then used partially used for the painting L’Oratorio di San Barnaba (fig. 1). This is dated 1905, the year in which Delleani donated it to the town hall of Pollone, but was most probably already finished in 1887, when it appeared under the title Festa al Romitaggio at the Esposizione Nazionale Artistica in Venice.² In addition to the well-known Uscita dalla Messa (Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, inv. no. P/1966), the panels include Vecchietta in costume dell’alto Biellese, a work of outstanding pictorial quality now part of the Cerruti Collection as well as a crisp preparatory study in pencil, again showing the unmistakeable figure of the neatlydressed elderly woman with a stick and the large bonnet concealing her face. Delleani was an excellent draughtsman and attention was drawn as early as 1949 by A. Dragone and J. Conti to this important aspect of his work in their pioneering study Paesisti piemontesi dell’Ottocento (p. 112). 

The drawing is undated, but the oil painting, in accordance with the painter’s standard practice, bears the precise date of execution “4.9.86.”, the same day as Giorno di festa.³ Another difference regards the setting. While the figure is isolated against the neutral background of the paper in the drawing, it forms a whole in the painting together with a landscape developed through dense, fluid brushstrokes but highly sophisticated in terms of chromatic combinations and tonality. 

The presence of the authentication stamp and the signature of the sculptor Lorenzo Bistolfi still visible on the back of the panel suggests that the work was one of those in Delleani’s studio on his death. According to the reconstruction of its subsequent changes in ownership put forward by Angelo Dragone,⁴ it was bought in 1948 (and loaned the following year for the exhibition Pitture oropee di Lorenzo Delleani in Biella) by the Turin businessman Sebastiano Sandri (1887-1954), a director of the Cartiere Burgo paper mills and a keen collector of 19th-century paintings, after which it passed through the Lombardi Collection in Cuneo before arriving in a private collection in Rome. Its purchase by Francesco Federico Cerruti, documented by the bill of sale signed by Giorgio Lombardi and Dina De Lucca (Rome), now in the archives of the Cerruti Foundation but unfortunately undated, must therefore have taken place after the publication of the Turinese critic Dragone’s monograph on Delleani, which is still an essential guide to the artist’s numerous works. 

Monica Tomiato 

¹ Dragone A. 1973-74, vol. I, p. 343. 

² Ibid., vol. I, pp. 341, 371, 385. 

³ Ibid., vol. I, no. 587, pl. LXXVI. 

⁴ Ibid., vol. II, p. 156.