Thomas Fransioli
Mt. Etna from Taormina
1971

Name: Mt. Etna from Taormina
Brand: Thomas Fransioli
Price: 28000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Thomas Fransioli, born in 1906 in Seattle, Washington, trained as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked as an architect before his service in World War II. Largely self-taught, he began painting after the War, his personal response to the destruction he had witnessed serving in the American Army in post-war Japan. After the War the Fransioli family settled in Cambridge, Massachusets, where Fransioli began painting distinctive views of Boston, seen through the prism of his interest in the intersecting geometries of architecture and nature. He sketched on site and then retired to his studio home to refine his images to oil paintings. When the family acquired a summer home in Castine, Maine, Fransioli found subject matter there too. Fransioli exhibited his works in Boston to critical and popular acclaim. A notice in the Christian Science Monitor attracted the attention of the prestigious Saturday Evening Post and led to a commission for a series of magazine covers, highlighting iconic city views of a number of American cities including New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. Fransioli, however, was not at heart, a magazine illustrator. Through the 1950s and ‘60’s he continued to paint finding his subjects close to home or reflected in his travels to Europe, most notably, London. In 1957, the Fransiolis moved to Connecticut. Fransioli paints a calm and orderly world, its contents presented through a clear, limpid light, its natural disorder contained within the bounds of a strong and crisp architectonic line. His work, though, is not strictly realist. Appreciative critics have located in his canvases echoes of Henri Rousseau, the French naive painter, and Giorgio di Chirico, the Italian Surrealist. Past the first sensation of recognition, the viewer responds to an underlying element of fantasy, the result of Fransioli's manipulations of form and scale upon what seems, at first, familiar subject matter. This imposition of the artist's own conceptual geometry has also generated descriptions of Fransioli as a Precisionist.

Creator:

Thomas Fransioli (1906 - 1997, American)

Creation Year:

1971

Dimensions:

Height: 15 in (38.1 cm)Width: 28 in (71.12 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Oil

Movement & Style:

American Realist

Period:

20th Century