Vittorio Reggianini

Vittorio Reggianini was born in Modena, Italy, in 1858. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Modena and later returned to the same academy as a professor, though the surviving record does not give exact years of attendance or appointment.

In 1885 Reggianini moved to Florence, where he shifted from historical subjects toward the elegant costume genre interiors, elaborately dressed figures in eighteenth century dress playing cards, reading letters, or flirting in drawing rooms, that became his signature and built his international market. He entered the Alinari Concorso in Florence in 1900 with a painting titled Tristis Matris Nati Presaga Finis, and exhibited with the Florentine Art Association (Societa per le Belle Arti di Firenze) in 1907 to 1908 and again in 1910 to 1911.

Major art references agree that Reggianini died in the late 1930s, but they do not agree on the exact year or city, and the two variables do not line up consistently from source to source. Some sources, including the Musee d'Orsay, give 1938; others, including Valutazionearte and the Italian Wikipedia entry, give 1939. The city of death is cited as Rome in some sources and Florence in others, without a clear correspondence between year and city. No obituary or civil record confirming an exact date has been located, so this profile records the year of death as 1938, the year given by the greater number of institutional and market sources, while noting the discrepancy.

No verbatim, attributable critical assessment of Reggianini from a named critic in a major outlet has been located. Where he is discussed, in auction catalogue notes, gallery biographies, and general reference entries, the framing consistently groups him with Italy's late nineteenth century costume painters, praised for technical polish, careful rendering of textiles and interiors, and a lightly theatrical staging of bourgeois and aristocratic leisure. The available commentary is descriptive rather than critical in the scholarly sense, and no major museum retrospective or monograph appears to have been devoted to him.

Reggianini's works trade steadily in the market for nineteenth century European genre painting, generally in the tens of thousands of dollars, with occasional results reaching into six figures for large, fully worked exhibition scale canvases. The highest price documented for a work by the artist is USD 292,000, for a painting titled The Birthday, sold in October 2000; the auction house and exact sale date are not confirmed in available sources. The best documented recent result sits well below that figure: Christie's London sold The Reading for GBP 57,650 on 21 November 2011. Given the gap between the 2000 result and the more recent documented sale, and the thinness of public data overall, collectors should treat the USD 292,000 figure as a historical high point rather than a reliable current benchmark.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Reggianini and no certificate of authenticity program; attribution rests on signature comparison (Vittorio Reggianini, V. Reggianini, or the compressed VReggianini) and on gallery and auction provenance. Basic biographical facts, including the exact death year and place, are not settled across major reference sources, so collectors should expect some inconsistency across dealer and auction catalogue biographies. Haynes Fine Art, based in London and the Cotswolds, currently offers his work on the secondary market, though it has not been confirmed as an official estate representative, and no formal estate or gallery representation exists for an artist who died in the late 1930s. Collectors should also note that an English language Wikipedia entry titled "Vittorio Reggiani," without the final "ni," describes the same biographical details, birthplace, and dates as this artist; the available research points to a naming or title variant rather than a separate individual, though the spelling difference is worth flagging when cross-checking sources.