After lunch at Moncia

The “Moncia”, a well-known trattoria outside the city, is the setting on which Apollonio portrays Countess Sofia Felissent Moresco.
Coming from a noble family of Piedmontese origin, involved in politics and the cultural field, Sofia Felissent is passionate about art and an amateur painter. She supports Apollonio’s work as a patron, from whom she in turn receives teachings on artistic practices: with him she enrolls (without success) in the first collective exhibition of the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa at Palazzo Pesaro, which in 1908 begins its own exhibition activity aimed at young artists. It is on that occasion that a work by Apollonio (Filò nel Veneto) is exhibited and purchased by the Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia.

For Dopo pranzo alla Moncia Apollonio adopts a pictorial language very different from the “official” portrait of her husband, painted the previous year, which she had

outlined in the timelessness of Pompeian red.
At the end of the lunch, smiling and dressed fashionably, the Countess seems to confidently affirm her freedom and emancipation by flaunting a “vice”, that of smoking, which at the time was considered completely inappropriate for women, especially if they belonged to high society.
Irradiated by an intense light, enhanced by the whiteness of the tablecloth and the wall, the scene is a snapshot of the present, a piece of serene everyday life: the choice of subject and setting, the spontaneity and immediacy of the whole recall the models of French painting and Impressionism, to which Apollonio seems to refer also in the use of a rapid and synthetic brushstroke, vibrant in the rendering of light on the objects left on the table as well as on the woman’s blue polka-dotted dress.
Like the previous ones, the painting belongs to the legacy of Countess Sofia Felissent Moresco destined, in 1944, for the collections of the Treviso Civic Museums.