Cosola Demetrio (1851-1895) Portrait Of Woman Oil On Canvas

Cosola Demetrio (1851-1895)

Demetrio Cosola lived his entire short life between Chivasso and Turin. At eighteen, he entered the Accademia Albertina in Turin, where he became a student of Gamba, Gastaldi and Gili, and from 1883 (he was then only thirty-two), the assistant by Gastaldi.

Later he himself taught at the Accademia Albertina, but preferred "playing billiards in the cafes of Turin and good Piedmontese wine". Cosola's production, compared to his short life, is important: he painted around 200 landscapes, as many portraits, around a hundred paintings of various subjects, and produced numerous drawings and sketches.

In his works, Cosola is distinguished by a particular delicacy and luminosity of colors, by the deep attention, more psychological than visual, with which he depicts the characters, even if they are not always (famous) personalities .

He showed his ability to create characteristic groups of people in small paintings that were more reminiscent of the Florentine painting of his time than of Piedmontese painting, and in which his fellow citizens could easily recognize friends, neighbors, playmates or friends. work. However, the portraits, landscapes, genre paintings and the numerous drawings and sketches provide us with sufficient documentation to count Cosola among the most important figures of Piedmontese painting of the 19th century.