Eugenio Gignous Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Eugenio Gignous was born in Milan on 4 August 1850: son of the French silk merchant Laurent and Maria Taveggia Brizzolara of Milanese origin, the young man was forced to work in his uncle's orthopedics due to the family's financial difficulties. Contrary to his parents' wishes, Gignous decided to follow his artistic vocation, enrolling in the decoration course at the Brera Academy in 1864 and winning a silver medal. Read the full biography

Eugenio Gignous was born in Milan on 4 August 1850: son of the French silk merchant Laurent and Maria Taveggia Brizzolara of Milanese origin, the young man was forced to work in his uncle's orthopedics due to the family's financial difficulties. Contrary to his parents' wishes, Gignous decided to follow his artistic vocation, enrolling in the decoration course at the Brera Academy in 1864 and winning a silver medal. Dissatisfied with the curriculum, the following year he moved to Luigi Riccardi's School of Landscape, where he remained until 1870, winning various prizes (including the Gold Medal for Progress of the School of Landscape in 1866). The master's influence was decisive for the plastic rendering of Gignous' sky, intended not as a simple chromatic background but as an integration of topographical forms, while the study of the landscape from life may have been suggested by him with Gaetano Incontro con Fasotti.

Soon after completing his studies in Milan, Gignous initiated exhibitions in Florence and came into contact with a group of disheveled painters, becoming friends with the older Tranquillo Cremona and Daniele Ranzoni. Reasonable evidence of this relationship is found in the painting of the country courtyard at Colombera (awarded at Brera in 1870), which seems to represent the house through the Conservatory and Tranquillo Cremona, while he paints the portrait of Benedetto Junck outdoors (ca. 1874. ), and the four-handed opera Faust and Margaret Nell Bosco (1873), in which the scenography belongs to the characters of Gignous and Cremona. Inevitably, Genos himself remained stylistically influenced by this group of artists, moving towards scattershot painting.

Suspicious of some vices, but not entirely unfamiliar with the behavior of his companions, Gignous cultivated more friendships, such as Achille Tominetti and Luigi Rossi, famous in Brera. In contrast to the former, he exhibited several times in the most important national exhibitions between 1870 and 1875, and perhaps executed some paintings together, and a comparison between the works of Gignous and Lugano Rossi will confirm the working relationship between the two subsequent movements of Rossi in Asti (1870) can also explain Gignous' attitude towards the so-called Rivara School, a group of anti-academic landscape artists active in the small Piedmontese town from around 1860.

At the end of the Seventies, after several trips (Monviso, Lake Como, Varese, Savona and Switzerland are just some of the places where Gignous is immortal) and a stay in Rome, Nostro came into contact with Filippo Carcano, perhaps at night. the school of the artists' family, with which he is presumed to be in France in 1878, first at the Paris Exposition and then in Lyon, to visit some relatives of Gignous himself. The following year Carcano, already a frequent visitor to these areas, took Ginos to the shores of Lake Maggiore, which would become his favorite subject (Riva a Feriolo, 1886).

After having made contact with the family of Dr. Angelo Ferry, Genos married his daughter Mathilde on 19 March 1881 (despite Ferry's initial objections), with whom he had seven children, dedicated to his new identity as a husband, the painter partially abandoned l artistic environment. On the other hand, his alienation was not so radical, since he remained in the circle of Brera artists: from 1880 to 1884 he was in fact an honorary member of the Academy, and from 1885 to 1894 he was an honorary member of the Academy Academy is the academic committee . In the same period he continued to send paintings to various art competitions, in which Turin promoters were often buyers of his works, as well as to the Ministry of Education; there would have been no shortage of private admirers, such as the purchase of a certain Autumn Testaments (1883) and 1891 King Umberto who purchased two works from him (March and Studio dal vero) exhibited at the I Triennale of Milan.

In 1887 he moved permanently to Stresa on the much-loved Lake Maggiore, and although he initially wanted to live near the Venetian lagoon, his wife objected: from this moment on the subject of his creation was an expanding area of ​​lake views (Lake Maggiore, Feriolo, ca. 1900). It should be noted that the subsequent creations of some themes in different seasons and in different atmospheric conditions, in search of a faithful representation of their changing visual data, are reminiscent of the work carried out by the French painter Claude Monet in Impressionist Experiences of about ten years ago. .

The cold Stresa winter, however, forced Ginos and his family to spend the season in Liguria, just as the summer heat pushed them to seek refreshment in the mountains, thus broadening the subject matter of the artist's paintings.

A lover of pipes and good wine, over time he was so ruined by tobacco and alcohol that he died of throat cancer on August 30, 1906.