Mother with Child
Gaetano Capone, 1900-1910, oil on canvas, cm 64x41
(1845 – 1924)
A representative work of the full maturity of Gaetano Capone, the leader of the Maiori school, dating to the early years of the 20th century. In this canvas, a typical example of genre painting of the period, a keen sensitivity emerges in the depiction of common subjects: a peasant woman is captured in her daily labor, with her child in a terraced garden amidst the lemon pergolas of the Amalfi Coast. Much like the Fisherman in Maiori (entry 28), Courtship in Ravello (entry 47) and In a Garden in Amalfi (entry 51), Capone here does not abandon the poetics of truth, ennobling the daily dimension through an engaged observation that restores dignity to rural labor, mediated by a luminous pictorial style and careful atmospheric rendering.
