Portrait of the Publisher Emilio Treves

Vittorio Matteo Corcos (1859-1933)
1907, Oil on canvas

An extraordinary example of the best of nineteenth-century portraiture, this painting was based on a photograph of the person depicted, which the artist has successfully transposed onto canvas. Corcos, a talented pupil of Domenico Morelli, went to Paris where he became a successful portrait painter. He declared that a 'portrait of a man must always clearly represent the social position he occupies in the world': which is the case in this 1907 canvas depicting 73-year-old Emilio Treves, whose work in the publishing field was important in the history of Italian culture. Treves was educated between Trieste, the city of his birth, and Paris, his city of choice; in Trieste he published his first works. He opened the Emilio Treves & C. publishing house in 1868, which became Fratelli Treves in 1972.