My Teresa

Painted in 1917 during the First World War, "My Teresa" is among Angelo Morbelli's most personally charged works — the title's possessive pronoun and the given name together suggest a portrait of someone intimately known to the painter, most likely a family member. Morbelli, then in his early sixties, had spent decades painting the impersonal subjects of institutional poverty — the anonymous elderly of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio — and a painting titled with such personal directness represents a shift toward private, emotionally invested subject matter. The war years imposed particular strains on Italian civil life, and for an older painter watching younger Italians mobilize and die, the act of portraying a beloved individual with the full resources of his mature divisionist technique would have carried considerable emotional weight. The work belongs to Morbelli's late period, when his divisionist technique was fully consolidated and he was applying it with maximum control and subtlety to a wider range of emotional registers.

A personal portrait in Morbelli's late divisionist style would apply the systematic color-strokes of his technique to a subject demanding psychological intimacy — a challenge that divisionism, usually associated with atmospheric and social subjects, had to meet on different terms. The closeness of the portrayal likely required smaller, more carefully modulated strokes to model the specific features of a known face.