Laughing Woman with Kerchief

Antonio Piccinni 1846 - 1920

Summary

A portrait of an elderly woman seen from the waist up. The subject is facing to the right, seen in three quarter profile and has an expression of laughter on her face. She wears a headscarf and a shawl. Her arms are folded across her stomach. There is no background detail. This etching was one of a collection formed by print expert PG Hamerton (1834-94) for the Manchester Art Museum, an educational gallery which opened in 1886 in the industrial suburb of Ancoats. The collection was transferred to the City Art Gallery in 1912, the Art Museum maintaining that they did not have enough space to display it. On acquisition, the prints were displayed together, with a catalogue of the pithy comments on each print that Hamerton had made in 1882. For this work, he had noted, 'Another of Piccinni's strikingly truthful illustrations of the lower classes in Rome, drawn much less for costume than the human element in them.'