Luigi Serena
PAINTERS
LAUNDRESSES ON THE SILE
Position in the museum
The author of this painting is Luigi Serena, born in Montebelluna in 1855. He grew up in Murano, an island in the Venetian lagoon famous for glassmaking, and attended the Academy of Fine Arts where he had Napoleone Nani, Pompeo Marino Molmenti, and Domenico Bresolin as his teachers; his fellow students were Luigi Nono, Ettore Tito, and Giacomo Favretto, who would become famous artists.
In 1878, Serena moved to Treviso: soon he was known for his lively paintings depicting everyday scenes. He loved to paint workers, peasants and moments of popular life, such as the Flower Market.
One of Serena's favorite subjects is the female figure. She paints women while they are engaged in housework, selling at the market, walking with friends or when they are the protagonists of love stories.
She often depicts washerwomen at work, both in the city and along the banks of the Sile. In this painting, Serena uses a well-balanced combination of light and color that makes her paintings lively and realistic: the women, bent over the cloths, are described with quick strokes; in the foreground the eye is drawn to the white of the sheets that contrasts with the water of the river and the shadows of the vegetation and houses, while the red leaves of the trees mix the colors of autumn with the blue of the sky.
TECHNICAL SHEET
The subject of the work, The Washerwomen, is recurrent both in city settings (as in Lavandaie ai Buranelli) and within natural settings such as the banks of the Sile. Hunched over cloths, the women are sketched with loose brushstrokes that recall Favretto's vivid pictorial descriptions. The color mixtures are rich and well-calibrated: the white sheets in the foreground stand in contrast to the water of the river and the carried shadows of the vegetation and houses, while the tree terminal dilutes the autumn colors in the blue of the sky.
The enhancement of the pictorial material and the attention to luministic effects, also evident in interior scenes (such as Sun Effect), place Serena's production in the ranks of national and international researches engaged, at the end of the century, in the renewal of the shot from life.
The work becomes part of the itineraries of the Civic Museums thanks to the important bequest, in 2002, of Teresita Gaetani Lorenzon: numerous, in fact, were the artist's paintings that belonged to the families of entrepreneurs Pietro Provera and Achille Lorenzon, proving his considerable fortune within the city's collecting environment.LAUNDRESSES ON THE SILE
Borgo Cavour, 24
31100 Treviso
Italy
+39 0422 658951
info@museicivicitreviso.it