TRAVERSI, Gaspare

Traversi’s subject matter was often taken from the lives of ordinary people and the bourgeoisie. The his popular genre scenes for private patrons include subjects such as the Engagement, the First Dance, the Embroidery Class, the Five Senses, Card Games and Musical Parties. All were painted with considerable attention to details of dress and furnishings, and thus provide an important record of contemporary life in Rome and Naples.

To use the term coined in the eighteenth century, this is an excellent example of a domestic scene or “conversation piece”. It contains the full range of types, and feelings, usually found in Traversi’s work which uniquely captured Naples under Bourbon rule with a full range of ordinary people, aristocrats, and common folk. Traversi was always ready to turn his well-developed sense of humour laced with sarcastic bitterness on himself. Nevertheless the immediate, brilliant liveliness of the subjects should not make us forget the stylistic aspect of Traversi’s work. He raised genre painting to a nearly monumental level, just as Giacomo Ceruti did in Lombardy. It is fairly difficult to pinpoint the date of these group portraits but it is likely that they were done around the middle of the century.

This painting illustrates a young woman receiving a letter from a secret lover, delivered by a page and observed by her two elderly parents and an older gentleman dressed in the French style and with a cane, possibly a well-to-do suitor. The subject pertains to the long sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tradition of genre painting, as does its companion piece The Concert.

Traversi, an important Neapolitan painter at the end of the Baroque period, produced a large number of large genre scenes showing people, places, and situations from real life.