Sunday, June 26, 2011

About Antonie Sminck Pitloo


Antonie or Anton Sminck Pitloo was a Dutch painter. His original name was Pitlo, but he added the extra "o" because he was often mistaken for an Italian while resident in Italy. In Italian he is also known as Antonio van Pitloo..

Pitloo started studying painting first at Paris and then at Rome, where there was already an international artistic colony, in 1811. He took advantage of a scholarship offered by Louis Bonaparte, the King of Holland. In 1815, after the fall of Bonaparte, the scholarship payments ceased. He was then invited to Naples by the Russian diplomat and art connoisseur Count Gregory Vladimirovich Orloff (1777 – 22 June 1826).

In 1820 he married Giulia Mori and thus became a citizen of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He became a lecturer at the Art Institute of Art at Naples where he specialized in pastoral painting.

Around 1826 he was living in Nicolette Del Vast 15, with Carl Gotzloff, Giacinto Gigante and Teodoro Duclere.

He remained in Naples until his death during a cholera epidemic. He was buried in the English Cemetery there.

He was considered a leading exponent of the "Posillipo School" of painting. His paintings have been compared to precursors of Impressionism, some sixty years before this was invented.

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