Eugenio Landesio pta

Eugenio Landesio (1810–1879) was an Italian painter and a pupil of the Hungarian landscape painter Károly Markó the Elder. Landesio’s career in Mexico was marked by his years at the Academy of San Carlos, where he exercised an influence on later exponents of Mexican landscape painting such as José María Velasco.

Early years Eugenio Landesio was born in 1810 in Altessano, a village near Turin in Italy. Born into a family of silversmiths, he lived in Rome as a child. He became so fond of drawing at an early age that his father resigned himself to the fact that he would be a painter. Landesio began to study landscape painting under the French painter Amédée Bourgeois and went on to become a pupil of the Hungarian landscape painter Károly Markó the Elder.

In 1873, during the administration of President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, the teachers at the Academy were required to swear adherence to the Reform Laws. Eugenio Landesio refused and had to resign his position. He wanted to be succeeded by José María Velasco, but Ignacio Manuel Altamirano imposed his own candidate, Salvador Murillo, provoking a public dispute between the painter and the novelist.

Influence

Landesio exercised a positive influence in his field, comparable to that of the Catalan friends who had recommended him in their own fields of figure painting and sculpture. It can be claimed that the practice of landscape painting as a regular institutionalized activity in Mexico began with Landesio. He had numerous outstanding disciples, including José Jiménez (1830–1859), Gregorio Dumaine (1843–1889), Luis Coto (1830–1891), Salvador Murillo (1840-?), who took over Landesio’s teaching position from 1873 to 1875, Javier Álvarez, and one exceptional one, who was to consolidate the discipline in Mexico and take over as the foremost teacher of the following generation: José María Velasco (1840–1912).

Landesio was an academic painter to the manner born, of great didactic and analytical talent. In line with academic norms, his teaching method at San Carlos involved the decomposition of landscape into its constituent elements, followed by the gradual detailed study of these elements and their subsequent restructuring, to esthetic ends, in the definitive composition. He combined work in the studio with painting from nature in the open air.

Landesio distinguished two large parts or integral sub-totalities of landscape: “localities” and “episodes.” The former include the different kinds of landscape surroundings and environments (skies, foliage, lands, water, buildings), while the latter include the different figurative groups that confer on a given place a sense of scale, differentiating topical features, narrative interest, or historical density (history, popular, military, or family scenes, portraits, animals).

Work Amongst his most important works are El Valle de México desde el cerro del Tenayo. The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Tenayo (1870) part of the Museo Nacional de Arte's Collection and Patio de la Hacienda de Regla. Patio of the Hacienda de Regla (1857).

Galería