Carlo Pittara and the painters of Rivara. A magical moment in the nineteenth century Piedmontese

The exhibition explores the individual and collective experience of summer meetings at Rivara in Canavese: artists mainly from Piemonte and Liguria, but also the Firenze-born Antenore Soldi, the Portuguese Alfredo D’Andrade and the Spaniard Serafin De Avendaño, were all guests in the castle of Carlo Pittara’s brother-in-law Ogliani, a banker. The exhibition looks at the artistic progression of the painters who attended the “coterie” of Rivara that centred on Carlo Pittara. There are twelve artists presented, coming from a variety of Italian regions and further afield, to emphasise the importance of an artistic season that went beyond regional borders. The moment that they represent is characterised by the search for a sensitive realism in the depiction of the rural landscape.The period of greatest vitality and brilliance in these regular convivial meetings in Rivara was between 1870 until the untimely death of Rayper in 1873, after which the group gradually disbanded in the latter part of the decade. This late 19th century “epochal period” permanently laid to rest the excess of historical painting and the delays in taste of academic teaching by introducing a jovial and sincere expression of reality. Rivara’s name was forever linked to a peaceful, long opposed but definitive “revolution” which was to influence the painting of Piemonte, Liguria and, in part, also Lombardia.

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