War portraits - two paintings by Renato Tomassi

 

Portrait at the Front, 1918.

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Portrait of a Young Officer, 1916.

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Renato Tomassi (1884, Subiaco - 1978, Rome), Italian painter. Mostly self-taught, while still resident in Rome he made the acquaintance of the prominent German artist Otto Greiner in 1905, and thereafter spent much of his life in Germany, both for study and work. From a family with aristocratic origins, his social standing helped him to became popular among the European aristocracy and upper classes as a portraitist. 

Though never aligned with any artistic movement, his early style was influenced by the Secessionists. It underwent a fairly radical transformation in the years following the outbreak of World War I, during which time he found himself fighting at the front as a lieutenant machine gunner. Like other soldier painters, his work expressed the emotional experience of war. But unlike the others, he focused on subjects away from the battlefield, scenes of day to day military life, landscapes, and portraits of his fellow soldiers. These two paintings are beautiful examples of that work.

Italy and Germany being allies during the Second World War, he remained in the latter for the duration. Much of his early work, along with that of other German artists, was placed for safekeeping in the vaults of the Nationalbibliotheke in Berlin; the library was subsequently bombed and his work destroyed.