welovepaintings:

Antonio Mancini

Il Saltimbanco

1879

Oil on canvas

203.8 x 110.8 cm

Vance N. Jordan Collection

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Mancini worked at the forefront of Verismo, an indigenous Italian response to nineteenth-century realism, producing haunting portrayals of circus performers, street musicians, and impoverished children taken from the streets of Naples. After suffering a disabling mental illness, Mancini settled in Rome, and with the support of American and Dutch patrons managed for many years to eke out a precarious existence. The artist John Singer Sargent, who famously declared Mancini to be the greatest living painter, eventually introduced him to a circle of wealthy English patrons for whom he produced notable society portraits. Many of Mancini’s paintings incorporated thick impasto, whose glittering light effects he enhanced by adding bits of glass, metal foil, and other materials.

Philamuseum.org