She signed herself Pasquarosa, going by her first name only. The word appears discreetly lettered on the covers of books, on sweet boxes and franked envelopes in her paintings, as if she was trying to make it blend in. Even when there is nowhere else to put it but the conventional corner of the canvas, Pasquarosa’s signature is always delicately low-toned, so that it never drags the eye away from the joyous subjects of her art.
The Italian artist Pasquarosa Marcelli (1896-1973) painted clouds of indigo pansies and hyacinths unfurling in waxy blue curlicues, glowing orange zinnias and pink cineraria, their daisy eyes becoming one with the embroidered panel on the wall behind them. She painted striped tablecloths, red fans and ordinary white teacups as if they were the greatest pleasures on earth.
The song of her colours is carried by the exuberant vigour of her brush. To walk into this show at the Estorick Collection, in bleak midwinter, is like watching a summer sun come up.
It is almost a century since Pasquarosa’s last show in this country, at the Arlington Gallery in London’s Old Bond Street in 1929. A British critic, enchanted by her still lifes, described her as “the best-known woman painter in Italy”. But time passes, tastes change, and Pasquarosa has been so forgotten that it is unlikely many people know her name either here or in Italy. Her paintings are still cheaply available online.
It is true that her subjects are simple arrays of objects generally confined (like Morandi) to a tabletop. It is also true that her love of what she’s looking at is as wholehearted and immediate as the picture itself. But look at a painting such as Calendule, showing a dense cluster of marigolds shoved at a jaunty angle into a bright green vase. It could have been too loud, cack-handed or coarse, but instead she has held it all together by balancing the circle of marigolds between two horizontal swathes of black wall and white tablecloth.
Pasquarosa was 18 when she ventured this early work. Born into poverty in the rural commune of Anticoli Corrado in the Lazio region, she had no formal education. Her zeal to learn came from watching other people paint, first as an artist’s model in Rome from the age of 16, then as the companion of the figurative painter Nino Bertoletti. Her heroism is that she just keeps at it, year after year, training herself, until the delight of what she sees is densely and directly communicated on the canvas.
The catalogue – which offers barely a word on her art, concerning itself mainly with her life and times and all the famous men she knew, from Pirandello to De Chirico to Carlo Levi – describes Pasquarosa, early on, as illiterate. If this is true, she made the most rapid ground. Fat letters lie on bright tables in her art, like the true gifts they are, and one of Bertoletti’s portraits of his future wife shows her reading aloud to their younger son while his brother twangs noisily on a guitar. But it is such a dull painting. The better-known husband is terminally conventional by comparison with the wife.
Pasquarosa favours colour over line every time; is always more interested in the group glow of violets, say, than the delicate form of any single flower. She paints in lush dabs and dapples of high-calorie oil, the marks often the very shape of the petals described. This is ideal for heads of hydrangea, especially those strange agglomerations of multicoloured confetti that she manages to convey so well, and so counterintuitively, in oil rather than watercolour.
And even when shifting from objects to people, her benign and ingenuous method seems to call forth something equally innocent in return. The Italian painter Felice Carena, for whom she modelled, appears here on a piece of pressed cardboard as a pale face with all-seeing blue eyes, surrounded by a marvellous orange beard and hair. It is a compelling combination of knowledge and naivety.
Pasquarosa never stopped working, and had many exhibitions, even when the successive -isms of 20th-century art had put the easel still life fairly out of fashion. Her success, like her enterprise, seems to run in parallel with the struggle for women’s right to education and to the vote in Italy (not achieved until 1945).
Best of all, in this show, is Jug and Little Bird, painted at some unknown time between 1918 and 1930 (the works are not dated, and nobody seems to have recorded the progress of her art). A sturdy jug raises a bird up on its lip like a strongman lifting a beautiful acrobat high in the air on the palm of his hand. The buoyancy of aspiration is as definitive as the shapely forms. Pasquarosa loved what she saw, but always took it further. These are paintings to gladden the heart.
Pasquarosa: From Muse to Painter is at the Estorick Collection, London, until 28 April
