From Muse to Painter: Pasquarosa at Estorick Collection
A century after her first solo show in London, the works of Marcelli Pasquarosa finally return to the city...
By
Susan Gray
February 5, 2024
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
Italian fauvist Pasquarosa Marcelli’s reputation was made nearly a century ago in a solo exhibition at London’s Arlington Gallery in 1929, something incredibly rare for an Italian woman artist at that time. The following year, Pasquarosa debuted at the Venice Biennale, going on to exhibit semi-regularly until 1954. The longevity and contemporary esteem of Pasquarosa’s career is surprising not only as a woman artist, but also because of her poor background. Coming from Anticoli Corrado, a small rural town near Rome, she had scant formal education when she arrived in the capital to work as an artist’s model in the years before World War I. In Rome she modelled for painter Nino Bertoletti, and in 1913 the couple moved into an artists’ and writers’ community at Villa Strohl Fern.
Pasquarosa displayed her work for the first time in 1915 at an exhibition of the Roman Secessionists, a group who rejected stale academic traditions but also extreme modernist experimentation. The works on display at Estorick Gallery chart Pasquarosa’s vibrant path between figuration and expressionism. A Small Nude (1913), painted in oil on cardboard, demonstrates her lifelong preference for colour over line, with a brown-haired female nude portrayed in daubs of pink, beige and brown, surrounded by sketchy yellow and red flowers, against a background of turquoise sky. The flat plane and perspectival cues coming from colour, light and later texture, rather than line, establish a characteristic style evident in all subsequent work. Calendulas, painted a year later on canvas, brings the artist’s trademark vibrancy to a simple still-life, with the marigolds an amorphous blaze of orange shades, and a scattering of darker rings indicating seedheads. By contrast, the vase containing the bursting blooms is a sparingly outlined block of green, and the book nearby is a simply delineated rectangle of three ochre, white and red planes. Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth (c.1914) presents a more complex still-life, with two vases of flowers positioned on the edge of the titular tablecloth, hinting at a real-life interior.
An impasto style and delight in mark-making are revealed in work from the later 1910s onwards. Hyacinth (1916) is a central column of heavily worked mauves, with an intermittently visible grey stem, surrounded by pared-back, sculptural dark green fronds. The plant pot sits in a deep bowl, with folkloric motifs on the white interior, which in turn sits on richly draped, ruby-red fabric, tactile qualities combined with a riot of colour. A more finely controlled impasto and more detailed handling of shape and positioning is revealed in Zinnias (1933) and Flowers (1949- 50), and a departure from flora shows the artist’s most assured handling of compositional elements and colour. Jug and Little Bird (1918-30), is a perfect balance of fauvist - the brightly decorated pitcher, with rim in dense, monochromatic grey shadow - with a tiny impressionistic blue and white bird perched on the jug’s spout. Just as the violets’ positioning in Violets on a Light Blue Tablecloth emphasises the table’s edge, drawing the viewer into the picture plane, the bird’s beak pointing towards the sinuous red handle draws attention to the angle of the spout, seeming to elongate the jug’s dimensions. Notions of foreground and background disappear, melting into one pleasing and harmonious whole.
Still-lives have rarely enjoyed the highest status in art; metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico held a well-known dislike of using the Italian expression natura morta to categorise images of inanimate objects. De Chirico believed that such compositions represented “life that is silent but which, in its silence possesses a mysterious and highly attractive life of its own”. Pasquarosa’s facility at other genres can be seen in her 1915 portrait of painter Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled. The oil on cardboard portrait captures Carena’s essence in a wash of orange hair and beard, slightly uneven black and grey eyes, and a stump of deep purple tie, coming to a ragged finish long before it reaches the bottom of the picture plane.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at pains to place its subject in the context of Rome as a hotbed of artistic influence, with visitors including Matisse and Kees van Dongen, together with Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. Patterns in Pasquarosa’s works have strong echoes of Russian and Ukrainian folk imagery; the well-connected domestic life of the Bertoletti’s is documented in short black and white films of the family enjoying Christmas in Paris in 1930, with a comic sequence of trying to manoeuvre a Christmas tree into a taxi and also playing in Pirandello’s garden. In the second gallery, a black and white photo of the artist as a nude model is followed by her husband’s rather conventional Portrait of Pasquarosa (c.1930) and the realist, composed to look informal, The Family (Portrait of Pasquarosa with her Two Sons) of the same year. On the opposite wall Pasquarosa’s Vase of Flowers and Letters (c.1950) and Flowers in a Mirror, from the previous year, show an experimentation with aerial viewpoint and playful use of colour and composition that was sustained throughout her career.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is showing at Estorick Collection until 28th April.
