Antonio Rossetti (Italian, b. 1819)
PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT SOUTHERN COLLECTION
Antonio Rossetti (Italian, b. 1819)

The Reading Girl

Details
Antonio Rossetti (Italian, b. 1819)
The Reading Girl
signed and dated 'A. Rossetti.f./Roma 1870.' (on the reverse), on a revolving carved marble pedestal
marble
78 ½ in. (199.4 cm.) high, overall
Literature
A. Panzetta, Dizionario degli scultori italiani dell’ottocento e del primo novocento, Torino, 1994, vol. ii, p. 168-169.

Lot Essay

As a virtuoso carver known for carefully pronounced details and delicate female forms, Antonio Rossetti worked largely in Rome creating genre and allegorical works under the tutelage of celebrated sculptors Giovanni Battista Lombardi and Francesco Somaini. As an exhibitor at the Exposition universelle as early as 1867, Rossetti’s oeuvre found an international audience, specifically the emerging elite of America’s Gilded Age. The present marble, a delicately balanced composition of a girl reading and braiding her long tresses is identical to an 1871 work, titled Self Help, presumably commissioned for an American patron of the artist’s studio (Christie’s, New York, 10 October 2001, lot 347).  Proving to be a popular model, the Californian politician Milton S. Latham commissioned Rossetti’s The Reading Girl in 1874 for his private residence at Thurlow Lodge, a sprawling Menlo Park estate subsequently purchased by the widow of Central Pacific Railroad founder Mark Hopkins.

Further examples of The Reading Girl are preserved in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1873) and in The Lichfield Library, Staffordshire (1883).

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