Enrico REYCEND (Turin 1855 – 1928)

Descending from a historic family of booksellers and art dealers from Monestier de Briançon, in the Dauphiné, that moved to Turin in 1675, where it carried on a profitable business until 1863, Reycend studied at the Albertina Academy, leaving it in 1872 without graduating.
He made his debut at the Promotrice in 1873 with two landscapes of the urban outskirts, where Antonio Fontanesi led his students to work en plein air. From 1874 to 1920 he also exhibited in the rooms of the Artists’ Club.
As a solitary and shy artist, but endowed with a marked personality, Reycend in a few years achieved his own pictorial language, moving away from Fontanesi’s painting. In 1878 he participated in the Universal Exhibition in Paris, where he directly saw the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, who he considered, like Fontanesi and the landscape painters of Rivara, the greatest innovator of painting.
From 1881 he exhibited in various Italian cities, becoming a more intimate and poetic alternative to Delleani’s realism; again in Paris in 1890 and 1900 and, from the first decade of the Twentieth century, also in the rest of Europe, in the United States and South America. He became an honorary member of Brera and took part in the first three Venice Biennials.
In the mid-1920s the economic collapse came and Reycend died in Turin in a humble rented room.
The real “rediscovery” of the artist and of the characteristics of his very personal poetic language, had to await the authoritative intervention of Roberto Longhi who, during the Venice Biennale of 1952, added the name and the works of Reycend to the Fontanesi – Avondo – Delleani triad of the «Piedmontese landscapers », recognizing him as the most informed painter of his time: the interest that the art historian manifested towards that almost unknown artist, led him to put together a small but selected collection of his works which, again in 1952, he donated to the Gallery of Modern Art in Turin.
 
MUSEUMS

Turin, GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna
Novara, Galleria Giannoni
Cuneo, Museo Civico
Dronero (To), Museo Luigi Mallé
Verona, Palazzo della Ragione
Rome, Palazzo De Carolis