Angelo Morbelli Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Angelo Morbelli (Alessandria 1854 - Milan 1919)
Angelo Evasio Teresio Morbelli was born in Alessandria on 18 July 1854. His father, Giovanni, from Casale Monferrato, was an official in the Savoy state.
He began his first musical studies in Alessandria, but soon had to abandon the activity because he suffered from precocious puberty and progressive deafness.
In 1867 he moved to Milan, where he attended the Brera Academy and became a pupil of Giuseppe Bertini.
After completing his studies, at the end of the Seventies, he began to exhibit in Milan and then also in Turin. Read the full biography

Angelo Morbelli (Alessandria 1854 - Milan 1919)
Angelo Evasio Teresio Morbelli was born in Alessandria on 18 July 1854. His father, Giovanni, from Casale Monferrato, was an official in the Savoy state.
He began his first musical studies in Alessandria, but soon had to abandon the activity because he suffered from precocious puberty and progressive deafness.
In 1867 he moved to Milan, where he attended the Brera Academy and became a pupil of Giuseppe Bertini.
After completing his studies, at the end of the Seventies, he began to exhibit in Milan and then also in Turin. His early works were inspired by different subjects: Mobelli, from historical subjects to landscape painting, still applied the teachings he taught in the academic field. Evidence of these beginnings is the large canvas of the dying Goethe exhibited in Brera in 1880: this work was the work of Mobelli before freeing himself from romantic idealism and participating in the new current of positivist philosophy already in vogue. France.
From 1883 Morbelli's paintings turned towards realism, presupposing that the subject came from the realities of his time: in fact, the painting Days last, depicting the poor old man of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio in Milan, was the year from which the Academy of Belle Arti awarded him the Fumagalli Prize.
In the early 1980s Mobelli married Maria Pagani, who bore him four children and became his muse, creating several paintings about motherhood. In the same period he met the art critic Grubicy; although the relationship between the two was not formally established as a contract between the painter and the gallery owner, the meeting undoubtedly has an impact on the painter's future pictorial style.
In 1890 Mobelli began to implement a progressive decomposition of color through rigorous research, in harmony with his serious and methodical approach to painting. In 1891 Alba, the work of this stylistic turning point, was exhibited at the first Brera Triennale.
From that moment on, the painter adopted the technique of pointillism as a tool for confronting the truth, continuing to demonstrate the descriptive realism and humanitarian and social interests that have characterized his work from the beginning.
With an emphasis on the value of atmosphere, with the technique of pointillism, Mobelli creates his masterpieces, many of them literary references from his contacts with the disheveled crowds of Milan and from his studies of Delacroix and French Romanticism.
Divisionism was for Mobelli a means of expressing modernity, even in its most dramatic and melancholy aspects. For him, of bourgeois descent and linked to the values ​​of that social class, it was necessary to express the "new", leaving the private sphere, even with technical means unusual in the academic tradition (he often used colors and brushes that he bought abroad). Of).
At the beginning of the nineties he became friends with Giuseppe Pelliza da Volpedo and with him tried to form an organized separatist group. The attempts failed and the two artists were isolated in their work.
In 1893 he purchased a house in Colma, in Monferrato, which became the subject of numerous paintings, in addition to the representation of mountain views, which inspired him in Valtellina) summer stay in Santa Caterina Valfurva.
With the beginning of the new century Morbery received important international recognition: the Gold Medal in Dresden in 1897, where he presented Per 80 cent and S'avanza, and on the day of the party at the Pio Albergo in Paris Terry Gold Medal Urzio at the World Fair.
These important recognitions pushed Mobelli to revive the theme of the poor elderly people of Trivulzio, and in 1901 he even founded his own studio there. The works created in this context are rich in content of social condemnation and should not be confused with propaganda: representing contemporaneity and, for Mobeli, but also through the presentation of the suffering of those forced to return to the solitude of silence. For example, the works born in this context are the six paintings of "Poems of old age" and "Christmas of Pio Albergo Trivulzio".
Mobelli's attention to society is characterized by an intimate pessimism (personally he was afraid of falling into pain like the old man he painted), the passage of lights and shadows imbued with a lyricism that captures resonance with musical compositions such as Se continua il canvas the memory of his first learning of music.
The clarity of Morbelli's vision is also strengthened by the maintenance of a universal perspective in the Renaissance tradition: his paintings avoid close-ups, leaving space behind real data for a broader sense of nature. His adherence to a painting made of light, in which the colors are pure, one next to the other, filaments, is well represented in some of his later works, the Ponte di Torcello and Panni al Sole of 1913., 1916, a painting full of wonderful naturalism that conveys the idea of ​​the timelessness of the image fixed on the canvas.
During the last years of his life, Angelo Morbelli met Carlo Carrà and Umberto Boccioni. He continued to further his research into separatist techniques, and evidence remains of notes written in his diary, entitled The Crossroads of Separatism.
He spent his last years between Milan, Colmar and the Val d'Usseglio until his death from pneumonia and his arrest in Milan in 1919.