Lot Essay
An Idyll of Como inaugurates a series of classic fêtes champêtres in East’s oeuvre. These include Landscape with Figures c. 1905 (Northampton Museums) and A Sicilian Wedding, 1909 (Private Collection). Frank Rinder praised this new departure in The Art Journal, as being ‘true to the sentiment of the title’. ‘A great thundercloud forms above and partially veils the dream-blue lake’, he noted, and comparing East’s peasant folk to the Watteau’s commedia courtiers, he noted ‘a harmony of colour and … atmosphere decoratively interpreted’. These words were echoed in The Magazine of Art which found East’s Idyll, ‘more than ordinarily happy in [its] combination of decorative feeling, poetic suggestion and graceful reality’.
Ira Nelson Morris, the picture’s second owner, was an American diplomat. In 1913 he was appointed the US Special Commissioner in Italy and we can possibly conclude that he purchased the Como painting because of his special links with Italy. It is also possible that the picture once hung in the US Embassy in Rome.
KMc.
Ira Nelson Morris, the picture’s second owner, was an American diplomat. In 1913 he was appointed the US Special Commissioner in Italy and we can possibly conclude that he purchased the Como painting because of his special links with Italy. It is also possible that the picture once hung in the US Embassy in Rome.
KMc.