Ritratto di vecchio

Composed of earthen shades, shadows and occasional, rapid streaks of light, this portrait of an old man (a native of Cadore: “this healthy, genteel folk” as De Pisis wrote, moved by his stay at Cortina d’Ampezzo) is a small masterpiece. More than the traits of the old man, the painter appears to capture, on that decorous face and in the small eyes that stare into the distance, the slow passage of an emotion, of an unbounded melancholy: as though owing to an absence, by now, of life.
The painting dates from the first year that De Pisis went to Cortina (1930), where from then on he would spend many of the summer months which, from Paris where he had his permanent residence, would bring him each year to Italy. And it was also the first year that he returned to the mountains of the Veneto and Trentino regions without his beloved mother, who had passed away that previous September. Something of the sensation of emptiness and privation that would envelop him for a prolonged period after this death appears to surface in the painting, which heralds, in the almost chaste poverty of its lineaments, the great portraits that De Pisis would produce in the last years of his life, spent for the most part in the seclusion of clinics and sanatoriums.