Emilio DELLA SUDDA
Biography
Very little is known of the life and career of the artist Emilio Della Sudda, who was originally from a Levantine family and was born and raised in Constantinople. He studied in Paris with Jules Lefèbvre and Benjamin Constant, and exhibited his work at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. The artist seems to have been particularly esteemed for his work in pastel. As a review of the Exposition Universelle noted, 'M. Della Sudda est regardé comme un des meilleurs pastellistes de notre temps.'
At the Exposition Universelle of 1900, Della Sudda exhibited three pastels in the Turkish section of the exhibition; a 'Portrait of Mademoiselle N. H.'; a woman in front of a piano, 'Kief'; a depiction of an insouciant young man with a flower in his teeth, and a 'Paysage d'Orient'; a twilight landscape of a cemetery by the sea. As the Constantinople-based editor and critic Régis Delbeuf, in an account of the Paris exhibition, noted: 'Here we find the Orient, the true Orient, with its light, its transparency and its troubling charm. We do not have to reveal who M. Della Sudda is, everyone in Constantinople knows the name and appreciates his talent. He is a son of the East. His eyes were opened to the spectacle of the world on the shores of the Bosphorus, and he had the good sense to recall them.'
