Leonardo Bazzaro (1853 - 1937) - Mercato dell'Orecchi, Chioggia 1936

Leonardo Bazzaro (Milan, 1853 - 1937)
Mercato dell'Orecchio - Chioggia 1936

Signed at the bottom right
Oil on panel in golden frame
Dimensions: 60 x 90 cm (82 x 112 cm including frame)

The son of a cloth merchant, from an early age he showed a marked propensity for drawing and figurative arts.
His parents, art collectors, followed this inclination and in 1863 they decided to entrust him to the private teachings of the landscape architect Gaetano Fasanotti, holder of the landscape chair at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where Leonardo enrolled in 1868, student of Raffaele Casnedi and Giuseppe Bertini. Considered one of the main exponents of Lombard naturalism, like Eugenio Gignous and Filippo Carcano, his production is mainly focused on landscape subjects where the representation of the daily family is enhanced.
In the early years of its activity, Bazzaro focuses on perspective views of the interior of churches and well-known Milanese palaces, with a verist imprint of a six-eighteenth-century matrix derived from the master Giuseppe Bertini: The former companions of Brera attribute him the nickname little Velasquez, to attest to the strong expressive intensity achieved in these first stages. In the late seventies, on the model of Mosè Bianchi, he frequently travelled to the Venetian Lagoon and, in particular, to Chioggia, where he experimented with landscape painting, often interspersed with genre scenes en plein air, enhancing the clarity of the light on the sea and the shades of the buildings overlooking the canals. Then, the attendance of colleagues Achille Tominetti, Eugenio Gignous and Uberto Dell'Orto takes him to the territories of the Verbano, where he reproduces those mountain landscapes that become his mark of recognition, He moved there and painted the tranquil atmosphere of his daily family life, thus becoming one of the most sought after authors by bourgeois collectors.