c. 1885

Portrait of a Young Boy

Italian, 1852 - 1930

Mancini's style ran the gamut throughout his career from street-life realism to flamboyantly decorative society portraits. In the 1860s and 1870s, with his friend and exact contemporary the sculptor Vincenzo Gemito, he became one of the major Verismo painters of Neapolitan street life in all its poverty and vividness, each artist producing memorable images of street urchins, fisher-boys, and other colorful types. A trip to Paris lightened Mancini's somber palette, and his style by the mid 1880s, accompanied by a striving for novel chromatic and textural effects, shows his handling of pastel at its frothy and luminous best.