Cicero's Villa and the Bay of Baiae

Edith Corbet (c.1850-1920)

Signed and dated 1909
Oil on canvas  13 x 26 ¾ ins (33 x 68 cms)

Provenance: with Hartnoll & Eyre, London. Bill Waters (in 1989). Peter Nahum, London.

Exhibited: Stoke on Trent Museum and Art Gallery, The Etruscans, Painters of the Italian Landscape 1850-1900, 1989, no. 77 (lent by Bill Waters).

Literature: C. Newall, The Etruscans, Painters of the Italian Landscape 1850-1900, exhibition catalogue, 1989,p. 64, cat. no. 77, illus. p. 65.

Edith 

Edith Corbet was a landscape painter, closely associated with the ‘Etruscan’ group.  In 1891 she strengthened her allegiances with the Etruscans through her marriage to Matthew Ridley Corbet, one of the group’s influential artists.

‘We found him [Giovanni Costa] working in lovely Venice, where … Mrs Corbet was also staying.  Costa had a very high opinion of this artist’s gifts, and used to remember with pleasure how, on that occasion, they used to go out together to paint form nature at Fusino.’  quoted in Olivia Rossetti Agresti, Giovanni Costa – His Life, Work and Times (Grant Richards, 1904), p. 228.

Edith Corbet’s works share the Etruscan preoccupation with harmonious and subdued opaque colour and panoramic landscapes on elongated canvases.  The Etruscans were the pupils and followers of Giovanni ‘Nino’ Costa, the Italian hero who fought with Garibalidi