In Church at Rome

Antonio Piccinni 1846 - 1920

Summary

Three rows of seated elderly women with a man standing in the foreground to the centre left. All are facing to the right and seen in profile. The woman in the front row is on her knees and is at prayer leaning on the chair in front. There is a tiled floor and little 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, 'An excellent study of commonplace expression verging on caricature, yet really very little more than truth closely observed and somewhat accentuated.'