Cesare Bacchi

Cesare Bacchi

Cesare Bacchi is an Italian painter and sculptor, born in Bologna on November 24, 1881.

Since 1894 he attended "Collegio Artistico Venturoli" under the guidance of professors Alfredo Tartarini and Enrico Barberi and, later, in 1902, he moved to the Academy of Verona to attend the courses of the Bolognese painter Alfredo Savini.

In 1906 he arrived in Montparnasse, a district of Paris to which he would remain attached for his entire life. In Paris Bacchi also followed the teachings of the master Paul Jean Gervais (1859-1936), specialized in female nudes and, in 1910, he was present at the Salon des Artistes Francais with “Improvvisazione”, obtaining the third medal. The painting portrays an opera singer, while she sings naked in front of a piano and a sculpture by Félix Charpentier.

In 1916 he joined the 34th Regiment of the Italian Infantry as a technical designer and, on March 20, 1922, introduced by the engineer Ubaldo Triaca, Cesare entered the Grand Lodge of France, where he was elected master on November 12 of the following year.

It was in the second half of the 1920s that Bacchi began to exhibit with a certain regularity at the Salons. In May 1938, he obtained the gold medal with the painting “Paul Verlaine” and the work was requested for exhibitions in Belgium, England and the United States. The painting was reproduced in the Journal Beaux-Arts on May 13, 1938 and in the magazine L’illustration on May 14 of the same year, while the publisher Vizzavona put postcards depicting the painting on the market.

Cesare Bacchi died in his home in Paris, surrounded by his family, on June 6, 1971.