Gennaro Favai

Gennaro Favai (1879–1958) was an Italian artist.

Gennaro Favai was born in Venice, son of the publisher Louis and Countess Teresa Albrizzi. After Favai was expelled from the Art Academy, the artist Vittore Zanetti Zilla took him into his studio, where he studied Venetian painting of the fifteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1904 he participated at the Saint Louis Exposition, where he was awarded a bronze medal, in the same year made the first of a series of long and short trips to Paris, where on several occasions he exhibited works at the Salons of the Société Nationale and Société Internationale de la Peinture à l’eau.

In 1907 he exhibited also for the first time at the Venice Biennale, in 1908 participating in the “Permanent exhibition of arts and industries of Venice” at the Palazzo Pesaro organized by Nino Barbantini; as a result the critic Charles Louis Borgmeyer dedicated an article to Favai in the pages of Fine Art Journal. During the 1914 trip to London, in the occasion of the exhibition at Coupil Gallery, integrates its vision of the landscape with the conception of light and space, he met the painter and illustrator Frank Brangwyn, with whom he began a long association. In the same year he met in Paris Kievits Maria, daughter of the Dutch Ambassador in France, multilingual writer, whom he married in 1918.

The stay in Taormina and Syracuse (1915–17), followed by the long stay in Capri from ‘19, are critical for the development of a new idea of the landscape.He moved to Positano, graphic artist enriched the corpus of sketches and watercolors of the Amalfi coast, published under the title "Golfo di Salerno, Costa amalfitana come fu vista da Gennaro Favai” (1925) and followed by collecting 56 drawings of the Capri Island (1930).

At the end of 1930 he traveled to New York, which significantly enriched his repertoire of landscapes.

By the 1940s Favai gradually withdrew from public life, although his house remained meeting place for artists and writers, musicians and intellectuals. By the 1940s Favai gradually withdrew from public life, although his house remained meeting place for artists and writers, musicians and intellectuals. He died in Venice in 1958.