Clemente Pugliese Levi
Born in Vercelli in 1855, he was a pupil of Enrico Gamba’s at the Accademia Albertina in Turin. Initially he was a genre painter, but a decisive meeting with Antonio Fontanesi (a guest of Pugliese Levi’s in Cannobio in 1881) led him to experiment with landscape painting, drawing inspiration from Reycend, Avondo and Delleani as well as the Impressionists, whose work he saw on his numerous visits to Paris.
In 1906 he moved to Milan and his work increasingly showed convergences with late Lombard naturalism, with a more fluid painting style which favoured intensely luminous colours, demonstrating the influence of Fontanesi as well as the freely-interpreted example of the Divisionists. At this time he began to spend long periods in the summer on Lake Orta, buying a house in Viganallo in 1920; the lake features predominantly in his paintings, as do the Alpine scenes of his frequent holidays in Macugnaga, Courmayeur, Zermatt and the Dolomites.
Clemente Pugliese Levi died in Milan in 1936.
