dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
künstler: Colin Unwin Gill
titel: Allegro
jahr: 1921
adresse: (Private Collection)
+: Oil on canvas, 117x228,5 cm
«Gill had a deep love of poetry and literature, and the arcadia that he discovered in Anticoli [Corrado] must have evoked in his mind John Milton's poem L'Allegro (1645) from which he borrowed the title and decided to base his composition.» (Llewellyn, 2013, p. 143)
«On their [Colin and Marjory Gill's, Winifred Knight's] return to Rome [from a travel to Viterbo, Orvieto, Assisi, Perugia, and Florence] in April [1921], having clearly developed a passionate love for Winifred Knights ('Jane') which he recorded in Ode, 1921, Gill scraped back the crucifix on his painting, and replaced it with her full-lenght portrait holding an bird-cage […]» (p. 147)
«Gill is certain to have been aware of the recent developments in Italian art that resulted in the founding of Novecento Italiano in 1922. […] Gill would have empathised with the group's desire to revive the tradition of large-format history painting in the classical manner. Through his friendship with Paul-Albert Besnard, the director of the French Academy in Rome, Gill would also have been conscious of developments in French decorative painting of the period and the work of the French Rome Scholar, Jean Dupas, seems to have been of particular relevance; Dupas' celebrated painting Les Perruches, 1925 […] bears a close stylistic affinity to Allegro. Indeed, Gill's Allegro anticipates many of the qualities that characterised Continental painting in the second half of the 1920s; the fact that it was exhibited at the seminal Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, 1925, suggests that it was still considered to be representative of British contemporaty art some four years after it was painted.» (p. 151)