Venetian by birth, Federico Zandomeneghi was associated with the Macchiaioli in Florence before moving to Paris in 1874 at the age of thirty-three. He was never to return to Italy. By the late 1870’s he had become a habitué of the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, where he met and befriended Edgar Degas. The two artists, both cantankerous, ill-tempered characters, remained lifelong friends. Degas persuaded him to exhibit at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, prompting one critic to write, ‘The little Impressionist school...has made some new recruits. Among them is Zandomeneghi, an Italian who is a most transigent Intransigent.’. He also took part in the Impressionist exhibitions in 1880, 1881 and 1886. His success in Paris, where he was represented by Paul Durand-Ruel, was never as great as that of Degas and Renoir, while he remained largely unappreciated in Italy until after his death. Indeed, when the Italian art critic Diego Martelli visited Paris in 1878, he wrote to the painter Giovanni Fattori that Zandomeneghi’s work belonged to ‘a new kind of painting whose concept and aim those at home cannot comprehend’. It was not until 1914, near the end of his career, that Zandomeneghi was given his first one-man show in his native country, with an exhibition of some forty works at the Venice Biennale of that year. In December 1918, a year after the artist’s death, the contents of his studio were dispersed at auction in Paris.

Praised by Suzanne Valadon as a ‘dessinateur exceptionelle’, Zandomeneghi adopted pastel as his preferred technique in the 1890’s, applying it to his drawings with an oil-like richness. His preferred subject matter in these works, as in his paintings, were single figures of the petit-bourgeois women of Paris, often absorbed in everyday activities.

This large drawing, whose signature was until recently obscured by its old mount, is a splendid example of Zandomeneghi’s skill as a pastellist. It is related to a painting of a Crysanthemum Vendor, of identical dimensions and tonality, in a private collection in Italy (1). The painting, which has been dated to the 1880’s or 1890’s, once belonged to the Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso and remains today in the possession of his descendants. It differs from the present sheet primarily in the substitution of the figure in the left background with trees and a landscape.

1. Piceni, op.cit., no.562.