View of lake Fucino

Aurelio Tiratelli (Rome 1842 – Rome 1900)

A predominantly landscape painter, since the 1970s Tiratelli has devoted himself to depicting the Roman countryside and the Ciociaria region, whose solitary landscapes or the alleys of their villages are rendered almost photographically thanks to a skilful use of mellow, bright colours and high-quality naturalistic drawing.
His study of nature takes place not only through sketches on paper but also through the daguerreotype, of which he was such a convinced admirer that he is considered one of the first Roman photographic painters.
Already at his first exhibitions (those of the Society of Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Fine Arts and the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878), Tiratelli achieved considerable market success thanks to his rendering and choice of subjects.
Exhibiting again at the 1890 Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rome, his works continued to attract considerable interest from the public, so much so that one of his works, Oil production in Ceccano, was bought by King Umberto I.
Less frequent in the artist’s production is the depiction of Abruzzi landscapes such as the View of lake Fucino.
The reason, in this case, may be due to both the lack of interest of admirers for this genre of painting in an area generally outside the routes of the Grand Tour and the difficulty for those landscape painters living in Rome to reach such distant and, moreover, dangerous places due to banditry.
For these reasons, the View of lake Fucino acquires a very special importance as it combines the rarity of the representation (before this, the only view with the same viewpoint is a drawing by Jacob Moore dated 1776-1779, now in Birmingham) with the interest in the historical-documentary fact of the draining of the lake between 1854 and 1878.