Llewelyn Lloyd Biography
Llewelyn Lloyd (1879-1949) was a painter of Welsh origin but born in Livorno. He studies alongside the personalities of Guglielmo Micheli together with Amedeo Modigliani, Oscar Ghiglia and Gino Romiti. Thanks to the attention of Giovanni Fattori who took an interest in the best talents of that group, he came into contact with the Florentine environment where he met the Macchiaioli painters including Telemaco Signorini and Adriano Cecioni. His first pictorial phase was characterized by a stylistic conservatism softened in tone, capable of combining classical tendencies and modern aspirations. Subsequently, his meeting with Plinio Nomellini led him towards divisionism, a style that he developed over time, using Liguria and Tuscany as natural settings. In fact, he became one of the leading exponents of Tuscan Divisionism. But this stylistic phase did not last long, so much so that after his stay on the Island of Elba his painting returned to more conventional tracks. In 1929 he composed an important art history essay concerning nineteenth-century painting in Italy, in which he celebrated the figure of Giovanni Fattori and underlined the debt that the artistic avant-gardes (expressionism, cubism, futurism, etc.) had towards the primitives Tuscans (Sienese) of the fifteenth century. Llewelyn Lloyd in 1944, after imprisonment in the Fossoli concentration camp and then in Bavaria, returned to Italy in 1945, to Florence, where he died in 1949.
