Pio Joris (1843-1921) - Paesaggio con cacciatore

Pio Joris (Rome, June 8, 1843 – Rome, March 6, 1921), Landscape with a Huntsman, dated 1886 on the back and signed and located (Rome) at the bottom right on the recto. Oil on panel. A work of great quality and meticulous execution. The panel alone measures 25 x 10.5 cm. In a contemporary gilded frame that complements the value of the work.

Pio Joris (Rome, June 8, 1843 – Rome, March 6, 1921) was an Italian painter, etcher, and watercolorist, belonging to the circle of Roman followers of Mariano Fortuny, known for a style characterized by a mixture of genuine verismo and a pleasing touch, fluttering and lively.

A painter known for a fundamentally commercial tendency, he was nonetheless considered in late 19th-century Rome one of the leading painters. He participated in the major Italian and international exhibitions, often winning first prizes and sometimes attaining undisputed successes (Munich Exhibition, 1869; Vienna Exhibition, 1873; Parisian shows; International Exhibition of Rome, 1883 and 1911; Exposition Universelle of Paris, 1878 and 1900, to name the main ones). The themes treated most frequently were those of Roman folklore, painted in an engaging manner and meeting the favor of the rising bourgeoisie; in any case he also dealt with historical subjects such as The Escape of Pope Eugene IV from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

The first artistic activity of Pio Joris stands as a meeting point between Roman and Neapolitan painting culture of the late nineteenth century. Born in Rome and academically trained, Joris always drew stimulation from the Neapolitan art world: Edoardo Pastina, a landscape painter from Naples, was his first master, while at the National Exhibition of Florence in 1861 it was the Neapolitans who gave the painter the greatest impetus to resume studying painting and dedicate himself entirely to the truth. He was a pupil of Achille Vertunni, with whom he made a journey to Sorrento and Naples during which he could personally meet Filippo Palizzi and Domenico Morelli and come into contact with the School of Resìna, which led the painter to create a personal style based on the impressions received. Joris, however, remained always tied to the southern art world: one must consider the influences he absorbed, in maturity, from the painting of Francesco Paolo Michetti. He was a very close friend of the painter Attilio Simonetti.

The figure of Pio Joris has often been compared to Mariano Fortuny, of whom the Roman painter was a friend and admirer, often in a disparaging way. Behind all this there is the tendency of criticism to emphasize Fortuny's commercial painting, neglecting the experiments of the Catalan aimed at pursuing a new naturalism not distant from the outcomes being achieved in the same period elsewhere in Europe. A new reading of Fortuny’s work recently proposed by critics, far from the stereotypes that accompanied it for more than a century, also leads us to evaluate differently the effects they had on Joris. Certainly the contact with Fortuny brought the artist a tendency to adopt a lively, virtuosic brushstroke and at the same time gave him brighter and more radiant color. The painter from Reus was indeed completely focused on the search for intense luminosity, painting on white ground and with swift brushstrokes to create luminous effects, derived from his reflection on the Spanish masters of the past and at the same time on the influences arriving from Japan in those years. Joris, better than any other Roman painter, managed to grasp Fortuny’s novelties, not stopping at the superficial level, but updating, during the Seventies, his painting to new chromatic and naturalistic values, moreover considering that Joris and Fortuny would spend time together in Spain painting, in a stay dense with consequences for the Roman painter. In the same years, a new reflection on painting arose in Portici, following the Catalan’s stay in 1874, shortly before his death, and its most complete example is Francesco Paolo Michetti’s The Corpus Domini Procession in Chieti (Private Collection) of 1877. “After the blessing” (Private Collection) earned Joris a gold medal and a thousand lire at the Naples Exhibition of 1877 and catapulted the painter among the leading Italian painters of the Seventies, those who, starting from Fortuny’s insights, created the “Empire of White,” as proposed by the Apulian painter and critic Francesco Netti, where light painting is realized with a lightening of the palette, flat colors, and white background.

Mariano Fortuny was presumably the conduit between Joris and the art dealer Adolphe Goupil, to whom the Roman painter would have been connected from 1868 to 1875. Goupil in Italy was seeking small pictures with anecdotes drawn from Lazio and Campanian folklore set in naturalistic and luminous settings, themes broadly treated by the Roman painter. This engagement inevitably brought Joris a success that extended beyond Italy, evidenced by the frequent participation in Paris Salons – where genre painting triumphed more and more – and which had become showcases for wealthy buyers. But Joris’s Parisian sojourns in the Seventies were more stimulating due to his contacts with Édouard Manet and Zandomeneghi, which brought him into contact with the Impressionist world, from which he would draw influences that he adapted to his interests.

Joris was one of the most famous artists in the Roman artistic and cultural panorama from the Seventies until his death; he was among the first members of the International Artistic Association, one of the ten founders of the Association of Roman Watercolorists, he almost every year took part in the exhibitions of Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Fine Arts, but he remained estranged from the cultural circles born within Symbolism. He was much loved for his expansive and amiable character, well regarded by colleagues and the contemporary critics. The figure of Pio Joris was among the most central and important in the panorama of Roman painting of the nineteenth century, particularly in the experience of landscape painting, with paintings pulsating with light and atmosphere, connected mainly to luminist and chiaroscuro interests, to the relationship with truth and nature, and also in light of the European update achieved through Fortuny and the Parisian experiences. His notebooks show that throughout his artistic journey he remained tied to the countryside and to Rome (With Ettore Roesler Franz, he was the painter of the corners of Rome that were disappearing under the new neighborhoods of the Capital) attentive above all to compositional cuts and atmospheric rendering. Although he was a highly prolific artist, works in museums and the antiquarian market are limited; he remains, however, an artist often present in the major Italian auctions with values ranging from 500 to 50,000 euros. The interest in light is the constant of Joris’s painting: La Terrazza (Rome, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art) is arguably his youthful masterpiece in which light is the sole protagonist. In the Nineties his works showed Michettian influences in topics related to religious rites, processions, and church interiors. In these works the luministic vibrations almost fracture the figures, as in Maundy Thursday (Rome, Academy of San Luca Gallery) considered by critics of his time as his masterpiece.