Federico del Campo

Biography

In 1893, the year of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a separate display of Federico del Campo’s views of Venice was shown there. It was organised by the London art dealer Arthur Tooth, who represented the painter.

Del Campo was born in Lima in 1837 and left Peru at a young age. Nothing is known with certainty about his first studies in painting at home. From about 1865 he studied in Madrid, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and there became friends with the history painter Lorenzo Valles. He then travelled to Italy and painted in Naples, Capri, Rome, Assisi and Venice. During a visit to France he studied new artistic developments in Paris. From 1880 he exhibited at the annual Salon of the Société des Artistes Français, and in the same year he settled in Venice. By then there was already a sizeable community of émigré artists there: Antonietta Brandeis and the Spaniards Martín Rico y Ortega, Mariano Fortuny and Rafael Senet. Del Campo became close friends with Rico; they sometimes painted Venetian scenes together, which the growing numbers of visitors to the city were eager to buy. In this way both answered a large international market for city views. Orders for del Campo’s work were so numerous that he painted individual views several times over. English tourists were particularly fond of his Venetian scenes.

He specialised in landscapes of Venice: the Grand Canal, the Doge’s Palace, St Mark’s Basilica. His buildings stand against a bright blue sea and sky, and the air is clear. The palette is light, the brushstroke short and fine, with delicate glazes laid over it, so that the surface of the paintings seems to shimmer.

It was probably his English clientele that led him to move to London in 1893. There he worked for aristocrats and successful merchants, and the Chicago exhibition seems to have secured him a comfortable life. Little is known about his last two decades. He died in 1923; sources give different places of death: London, Venice, Bordeaux. Very few of his paintings survive in Peru.