Portrait De Mai Sewell Costetti - Giovanni Costetti (1874 - 1949)

Giovanni COSTETTI
Reggio Emilia, 1874 - Florence, 1949

Portrait of Mai Sewell Costetti

Oil on cardboard, 76 x 63 cm
Signed at lower left 'G. Costetti'.
Executed in 1942 (?) according to the label on the back which mentions “Giovanni Costetti, portrait of Mai Sewell Costetti (Utrecht 1942) to a family member.”

Provenance:
Artist's family;
Arild Wahlstrøm, Norwegian collector (1909 - 1994);
By succession to heirs.

Exhibitions:
Exhibition of paintings and drawings by Giovanni Costetti, Civica Galleria Antonio Fontanesi, December 1950 - January 1951, Reggio Emilia, cat. no. 66.


The painting comes from the important collection of Norwegian businessman Arild Wahlström.

Arild Wahlström was a Norwegian industrialist and CEO, later chairman of Sande Tresliperi A/S and Sande Paper Mill A/S. Besides business and sports, Wahlström had a great interest in art and art collecting, which he shared with his wife Aasta. At their home in Holmenkollen, the couple assembled an extensive collection of important Norwegian and international works. Wahlström traveled extensively and often combined his trips with visits to galleries and artists. He developed close relationships with several artists and met Poliakoff, Henry Moore, Soulanges, Manessier, Singier and many others.
He was invited three times to visit Picasso in the south of France with gallery owner Kahnweiler, but each time business got in the way, which was a great disappointment. Wahlström's great interest in Picasso's graphics broke out after the war, during a business trip to Paris in 1946. In a small side street, the Wahlström couple discovered an image of a woman's head in an art gallery. “It was so beautiful: we were immediately fascinated by it. It was something extraordinary.” The incident led to intense collecting and gave rise to one of the world's largest private collections of Picasso graphics, with more than 1,000 graphic prints. In 1982 Arild Wahlström donated nearly 500 of these prints, including the entire Vollard suite, to the National Gallery in Oslo.