Carlo BOSSOLI
Davesco 1815 - Turin 1884
Biography
Perhaps the foremost topographical artist in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, Carlo Bossoli was born near Lugano in Switzerland and as a child emigrated with his family to in Odessa in southern Ukraine. He was recognized as a young artist of considerable ability, and soon came to the attention of the Countess Elizabeth Vorontsov, wife of the governor of the province, who encouraged him to train with the Italian decorative artist Rinaldo Nannini, a pupil of the Milanese architect and stage designer Alessandro Sanquirico, who was working in Odessa. Bossoli began his career as an apprentice stage designer at the Odessa Opera, and by the age of eighteen was selling his drawings of views of Odessa and the surrounding landscape. With the support of the Vorontsov, he was able to study in Rome in 1839-1840. On his return to Ukraine in the early 1840s he travelled extensively around the Crimea, producing a large number of drawings, watercolours and gouaches of everyday life, local costumes and views of the main sites and cities there. Bossoli and his family returned to Europe in 1843, eventually settling in Milan. In 1850 he made his first visit to England and Scotland, and the following year visited Spain and Morocco. By 1853 Bossoli had settled in Turin, where he lived for the remainder of his career. He began producing panoramic landscapes and city views that were often published as lithographs in albums for the commercial market, such as Vedute della città di Torino, which appeared in 1851, and Galleria sulla linea ferroviara Torino-Genova, published two years later.
With the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, Bossoli decided to travel to London, where his knowledge of the Crimea stood him in very good stead. The immense interest on the part of the British public for views of Sebastopol, Balaklava, Inkermann and the other battlegrounds mentioned in news reports encouraged Bossoli to produce a series of fifty-two Crimean views that were reproduced as lithographs for a lavish volume entitled The Beautiful Scenery and Chief Places of Interest Throughout the Crimea from Paintings by Carlo Bossoli, published in London in 1856. These views were considered some of his finest works as a topographical artist, and among the many avid collectors of Bossoli’s watercolours of Crimean landscapes were Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. Bossoli exhibited his works at the Royal Academy between 1855 and 1859, and in 1857 undertook his longest journey yet, travelling through France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Switzerland. Each of his travels resulted in drawings and watercolours of the cities and sites that he visited. Between 1859 and 1861 he was attached to the Piedmontese (Royal Sardinian) army and produced a splendid series of well over a hundred gouaches illustrating the military campaign for the independence of Italy, commissioned by Prince Eugenio di Savoia-Carignano; all but ten of these are now in the collection of the Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento in Turin. Bossoli died of a heart attack in Turin in 1884.
