FNetti

The Little  Soldier, 1875

Oil on canvas, cm 45,5x21

Signed and dated on the lower left «F.Netti 1875»

Inscription on the back: «August 1875/ F. Netti»

Bari, private collection

The painting takes up a theme with a Risorgimento flavour, often treated by the artist in the 1960s, before he left for Paris at the end of 1866, as seen in the paintings Remembrance of 15 May 1848 (1861) and The Soldiers. 
The child portrayed plays soldier, with a saber and a rifle almost as big as him. On the head, a military headdress that glides wittily over the eye accentuates the sense of the successful disguise for which he posed and the painter portrays him in the whole figure, frontal and laughing. The painting appears loose, immediate, rendered with broad and generous brushstrokes that reveal the spontaneous character of the painting. Particularly successful is the shirt that wears the soldier, with shades of blue and pink; the background of the tablet, held on shades of gray, blue and red, is left indistinct, as often happens in portraits and compositions of figures of Netti. It is interesting, then, to remember that Gioacchino Toma, another great painter from Puglia of the nineteenth century, dedicated himself especially in the early sixties to the theme of patriotism, transferring it to the world of children and play, as in the painting The children of the people, 1862, today at the Provincial Art Gallery of Bari.