Sophie Della Valle di Casanova Browne
She was born in 1866 into a well-off diplomatic family of Dublin, but lived most of her life in Pallanza, where her grandfather Peter had built a chalet on top of the Castagnola hill. When Arnaldo Ferraguti came to Pallanza, Sophie studied privately with him, borrowing the Ferrara artist’s realist subjects and his use of pastel technique.
In 1896 she married her cousin, the marquis Silvio Della Valle di Casanova, a musicologist, student of German literature and symbolist poet; together they reconstructed the family villa in Pallanza, called Villa San Remigio, and magnificently re-designed its grounds, creating a hybrid between an Italian Renaissance garden and a Romantic English one, richly decorated with statues and fountains in the symbolist style.
After her marriage, Sophie (who now began to initial her paintings with the monogram “SVC”) steered her artistic production towards subjects of mythical inspiration, in which a strict adherence to the factual world has been lost.
Her guests at Villa San Remigio included many personalities from the world of art, such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Umberto Boccioni, and Ferruccio Busoni.
She died in Milan in 1960.
