Pio Joris (1843-1921) - Paesaggio con cacciatore

Pio Joris (Rome, June 8, 1843 – Rome, March 6, 1921), Landscape with a Hunter, dated 1886 on the back and signed and located (Rome) in the bottom right on the recto. Oil on panel. A work of great quality and execution finesse. The panel alone measures 25×10.5 cm. In an era-appropriate gilded frame that enhances the work’s value.

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 the mixing of genuine verismo and a pleasant touch, fluttering and lively.

A painter known for a fundamentally commercial tendency, he was nevertheless considered one of the leading painters in late nineteenth-century Rome. He took part in major Italian and international exhibitions, often winning first prizes and sometimes achieving indisputable successes (Monaco Exhibition, 1869; Vienna Exhibition, 1873; Parisian exhibitions; International Exhibition of Rome, 1883 and 1911; Paris Universal Exposition, 1878 and 1900, to name the main ones). The most frequently treated themes were those of Roman folklore, painted in an engaging manner and meeting the favor of the nascent bourgeoisie; however he also undertook historical subjects such as The Flight of Pope Eugene IV from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

Pio Joris’s early artistic activity stands as a point of intersection between Roman and Neapolitan painting culture in the late 19th 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 1861 National Exhibition in Florence it was the Neapolitans who provided the greatest stimuli for him to restart studying painting with a total dedication to the truth. He was a pupil of Achille Vertunni with whom he made a trip to Sorrento and Naples, during which he could meet Filippo Palizzi and Domenico Morelli in person and come into contact with the School of Resìna, which led the painter to form a personal style based on the impressions received. Joris, however, remained always connected to the southern artistic world: one must consider the influences he drew upon, in maturity, from Francesco Paolo Michetti’s painting. He was also very close to the painter Attilio Simonetti.

The figure of Pio Joris has often been coupled with Mariano Fortuny, of whom the Roman painter was a friend and admirer, in a largely dismissive way. Behind all this there is the critical tendency to emphasize Fortuny’s commercial painting, neglecting the experiments of the Catalan, aimed at a new naturalism not far from the outcomes reached in the same period elsewhere in Europe. A fresh reading of Fortuny’s work recently proposed by critics, distant from the stereotypes that accompanied it for more than a century, also leads us to reassess the effects it had on Joris. Certainly contact with Fortuny brought the artist a tendency to adopt a brio and virtuoso brushwork and at the same time gave him a brighter and more vibrant chromaticism. The painter from Reus indeed was fully focused on seeking intense luminosity, painting on white ground and with swift brushstrokes to create luminous effects, arising from his reflections on the Spanish masters of the past and, at the same time, on the suggestions emanating from Japan in those years. Joris, better than any other Roman painter, was able 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 rich in consequences for the Roman painter. In the same years a new reflection on painting method occurred in Portici, following the Catalan’s stay in 1874, shortly before his death, with his most complete example in the “Processione del Corpus Domini a Chieti” (Private Collection) by Francesco Paolo Michetti in 1877. “After the blessing” (Private Collection) earned Joris a gold medal and one thousand lire at the Naples Exhibition of 1877 and propelled the painter among the leading Italian painters of the Seventies, those who, starting from Fortuny-inspired 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 likely the intermediary between Joris and the art dealer Adolphe Goupil, to whom the Roman painter would have been linked from 1868 to 1875. Goupil in Italy was seeking small paintings with anecdotes drawn from Lazio and Campanian folklore immersed in naturalistic and luminous settings, themes abundantly treated by the Roman painter. This engagement inevitably brought Joris a success that extended beyond Italy, evidenced by his frequent participation in the Paris Salons – where genre painting triumphed more and more – which had now become showcases for wealthy buyers. But Joris’s Parisian sojourns in the seventies were more stimulating due to the contacts the Roman artist had with De Nittis and Zandomeneghi, which brought him into contact with the Impressionist world from which he would draw suggestions and adapt to his own interests.

Joris was one of the most well-known artists in the Roman artistic and cultural panorama from the seventies until his death; he was among the early exponents of the International Artistic Association, one of the ten founders of the Association of Roman Watercolorists, he participated almost every year in the exhibitions of Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Fine Arts, but remained aloof from the cultural circles born within Symbolism. He was much loved for his expansive and affable character, well regarded by colleagues and by the contemporary critical establishment. The figure of Pio Joris was among the most central and important in the panorama of nineteenth-century Roman painting, particularly in the realm of landscape painting, with paintings pulsating with light and atmosphere, tied mainly to luminist and chiaroscuro interests, to the relationship with truth and with nature, including in light of European aggiornamento achieved through Fortuny and through Parisian experiences. His notebooks show that throughout his artistic path he remained attached to the countryside and to Rome (with Ettore Roesler Franz, he was the painter of the angles of Rome that were disappearing under the new quarters of the Capital) attentive especially to compositional cuts and atmospheric rendering. Despite having been a highly prolific artist, museum and antique market works are limited; nevertheless he remains an artist frequently present at major Italian auctions with values ranging from 500 to 50,000 euros. The interest in light is a constant in Joris’s painting: La Terrazza (Rome, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art) is undeniably his youthful masterwork in which light is the sole protagonist. In the nineties his works bore Michettian influences in subjects related to religious rites, processions, and church interiors. In these works the luminous vibrations almost fracture the figures, as in Maundy Thursday (Rome, Academy of Saint Luke Gallery) considered by critics of his time to be his masterpiece."