FRANCESCO HAYEZ
(Venice 1791–Milan 1882)
Self-Portrait in a Group of Friends
1827
Oil on canvas
32,5×29,5 cm
Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan
ARTWORK
In this self-portrait dated 1827, Francesco Hayez is depicted surrounded by friends: on the left, the painters Pelagio Palagi and Giovanni Migliara (in profile), and on the right, the painter Giuseppe Molteni, wearing a top hat, and the writer Tommaso Grossi, a great friend of Alessandro Manzoni and the only one with no hat.
Hayez, in the foreground and in the centre of the scene wears, like Palagi and Migliara, a painter’s cap with a peak and a pair of round spectacles.
The unfinished background blends and combines with the fabric of the clothing and seems to unite the figures: friendship and intellectual affinity are perhaps the true themes of the work, which is almost considered a cultural manifesto of Milanese Romanticism.
The Poldi Pezzoli Museum hostrs two other paintings by Hayez: The Self-portrait with a Tiger and Lion from the early 1830s and the famous Portrait of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli (1851), the museum’s founder, who wanted his likeness painted by the favourite portraitist of the Milanese upper-middle class and aristocracy, who in turn loved the painter’s rigorous artistry and interest in exploring the psychology of his subjects.
BIOGRAPHY
Francesco Hayez was born in Venice in 1791, and is the most important painter of the Italian Romantic movement. His great historical paintings, set mostly in the Middle Ages, received widespread acclaim at the time, often hiding a patriotic message related to the Risorgimento.
After training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, he won a scholarship to study in Rome, where he met the famous neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova. He spent almost the entirety of his long career in Milan, where he moved in 1822 at the age of thirty-three after obtaining a professorship at the Brera Academy, of which he would later be director. Here he became a leading figure not only in historical painting but also in portraiture, thanks to his capacity for psychological exploration; a skill demonstrated in the famous portrait of Alessandro Manzoni, as well as in that of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, depicted in a similar pose.
Hayez died in Milan in 1882.
