(Turin 1852–1885 London)
Portrait of an Elegant Lady with a Dog, signed Pietro Morgary on the reverse, oil on canvas, 150 x 104 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection, Italy, for four generations.

We are grateful to Dr. Arabella Cifani for her assistance with cataloguing the present lot.

Pietro Morgari was born into a family of distinguished artists who were mainly focused on religious painting. His family provided his early artistic education. He enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Turin in the 1860s, where he was a pupil of Andrea Gastaldi and Enrico Gamba. He made his debut at the Promotrice di Torino in 1872, and began exhibiting at the Promotrice in Genoa in 1873. He became famous in the field of animal painting due to his passion for depicting animals. He moved to London permanently in 1885, where ruinous passion for a woman led to his suicide on 29 September 1885. Continued interest in his canvases in England led him to sign himself often as ‘Morgary’ or ‘Margary’.

This painting is a major work by Morgari and certainly one of his most significant. It can be dated to the artist’s English period as the back of the painting is signed ‘Pietro Morgary’ in English.
The protagonist of this canvas is a beautiful, elegant lady with a splendid hunting dog beside her. Morgari himself was the owner of many pedigree dogs. The painter used special machinery which enabled him to hold the animals in position in order to portray them. This subject matter, combined with his mastery of human portraiture, brought him a wide audience and great appreciation in the English market. The background of the painting evokes the style of the great English landscape painters of the late 18th and early 19th century. The pensive lady might well be the very one for whom he took his own life at only 33 years of age.